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TITLE SPONSOR FOR MATHFEST 2

Contents
Message from the HOD, 6
Editorial, 7

Articles
Turning the Game Over, 8
How to lose friends and alienate people, 10
The Weirstrass Function, 12
Math in Video Games, 14
The Mathematician : Paul Erdos, 16
The Grand Hilbert Hotel, 18
Square values of Mathematical Expressions, 21

Interview with Krutika Tawri, 24

Fun
Puzzles, 25
Comics, 26
Puzzles Solution, 27

A Message
from the HOD
As another exciting academic year is coming to an end, the second issue of Convergence is now in your
pious hands. Before going further, I would like to acknowledge that this has been made possible by the
hard work, greater spirit, and innovation of our students. They are unswerving in their determination to
taking the knowledge of mathematics to new heights.
We in BITS, have adopted a unique educational process which makes students think at a progressively
higher level, and carry their learning beyond the memorization domain. Towards the end of their graduation, every student feels his or her critical and creative thinking skill in mathematics enhanced phenomenally.
An annual magazine is a great way to share our experience with the readers. It should have a great educative value. I am sure, Convergence explores and expresses the power of creative-revolutionary-innovative
ideas that how our students approach and treat mathematics!

msg from HOD

I hope you will enjoy reading our annual magazine and learning about all the wonderful things that our
students and faculty are doing. I congratulate and thank all the students who have contributed their
valuable creations for publication. I also appreciate the strenuous efforts made by the editorial board in
shaping this edition a top class one.
I convey my best wishes to all and wish you a lively and informative reading.

Dr. Prasanna Kumar

(Head of Department, Mathematics)
BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus

The Editorial
If youre reading this, the editorial of a magazine called Convergence, it is a safe assumption that you must
have had a taste of the beauty that Mathematics has to offer. You were, at one point in your life, amused
with the orderliness, the rationality and the truthfulness which it brings to the table. You marveled at
the existence of more than one ways to solve a problem, the analysis of a problem as if it were a real life
situation, the visualisation of concepts in two or three dimensions and so on. The journey began with
numbers and the various elementary operations that you could do on them, followed by equations, and
trigonometry, and calculus and so on.
Some of us, daunted by the growing complexity, chose to drop out from this lovely journey. While some
of us still use it in myriad ways as a foundation for various applied sciences. In doing so, we often forget
that Eureka moment or that little eye-brow raising moment, which made us taste the beauty of Maths in
the first place. Convergence, in its second edition, tries to relive that beauty and the love for the subject
which we all once discovered as a kid. From applied Math concepts like Game theory to pure Math topics
msg from HOD
Editorial
like square values of ancient mathematical expressions, from combinatorial Maths to infinite paradoxes
and pathological functions, we have attempted to bring up that eye-brow raiser. Convergence also, in a
way or two, strives to imbibe a liking towards the courses offered by the Department of Mathematics,
BITS Pilani K. K. Birla Goa Campus. It also hopes to bring about that immense joy that one gets in giving
ones head a nice scratch while going about solving mathematical puzzles, and at the very least tries to
tickle your funny bone with some mathematically hilarious comic strips.
Regardless of whatever equation you have had with Mathematics, we hope you find your fodder, something you can relate to and thoroughly enjoy reading in this edition of Convergence. We do promise you
that each little write-up in this edition will leave you completely intrigued, enlightened and educated. And
to be really honest, on the path to excellence which most of us have set to achieve, one just cannot ask
for anything more. Read on!
Siddhartha Govilkar
Editor-in-Chief

TURNING THE GAME OVER

ARTICLE

BY RUTUJA SURVE

Chess, combat, zeroing in on a movie to watch, a

game of cards, shopping at a mall, ordering food
at a restaurant, negotiations- all these deliberately
chosen examples have five features in common:

Now, lets turn detective, applying game theory

to the study of crime. The players, of course, are
the criminals and the police. The choices that the
criminals have to make are:

1. Conflicting entities, or players, such as chess

opponents or negotiating parties.
2. Making choices, such as ordering Chinese at the
restaurant.
3. Information, based on which you make your
choices like considering movie reviews before you
decide to watch one.
4. Desired results, like hoping your bluff works
whilst playing a game of poker.
5. Results of choices, like victory or a loss in Chess
games, the Chinese food you ordered not quite
living up to the expectations, and so on.

1) Potential places to rob (for this case: Bank A and

Bank B)
2) The time of operation (in the broad daylight or at
night)
As for the police, different patrolling schedules
including
1)Location, and
2)Time serve as choices.
The payoffs are a successful raid and a safe escape
for the criminals and a successful red-handed
capture of the criminals for the police.

Game theory is the branch of mathematics which

deals with such conflicting situations, tackling them
with particular perspectives and strategies. It was
first presented to the public and the academic world
in the monumental treatise by John von Neumann
and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior, published in 1943. The two
principal areas of its application were war and
economics.

This scenario can be neatly illustrated in the table that follows:

Let us assume that the criminals are captured and held as prisoners. During interrogation, they are asked to
give details of their entire gang, including the ones who were not present during the robbery. The police end up
bringing these suspects behind bars as well. The police divide these newly captured suspects into two groups
and decide to interrogate them separately. Lets look at the famous Prisoners dilemma matrix, illustrating
possible actions that the two suspect groups might take. Assume that both groups have two choices. They can
either confess or they can deny their hand in the crime. Assume also a set of outcomes corresponding to each
set of choices: for example, if both groups deny the crime, then each of them gets five years of jail, whereas
if only one of them confesses, then that group gets 20 years of jail and the other one is set free. The features
of the conflict situation might be represented in the matrix at the end of the page. This matrix includes the
players (Group A suspects, Group B suspects), choices (confess or deny), outcomes or results (time to be spent
in jail), and the dependence of the outcome on the actions of each player. Each player has the goal of getting
acquitted.

The first number in each pair is the payoff to Group A (number of years in jail) , the second
the payoff to Group B . If the numbers in the pair are equal and of opposite sign, it becomes
a zero sum game.
On the right is an illustration of the MaxMin concept of game theory:
This is a strategy for B that ensures the same return irrespective of the strategy used by A.
Let x be the average payoff to player B, p1 be the probability of making choice B1 and p2 be the probability of
making choice B2. Then
x = 5p1 1p2 = -4p1 + 3p2
and p1 + p2 = 1, since probability of making a choice is 1.
The mathematical techniques used in game theory aim towards maximization of the minimum payoff, where
the minimum payoff is the least amount a player can receive from a strategy choice. The solution (set of
expected outcomes) to the game when this strategy is adopted by each player is the equilibrium solution,
so-called because neither player can gain by changing his strategy unless the other player also changes his
strategy. Solutions for two-person, zero-sum games with finite numbers of choices are easily solvable. This can
be extended to n-person games, infinite games, non-zero-sum games using mixed strategies.
When stuck up at the precipice of making indispensable choices in life, the fascinating concepts of game theory
can surely help you in turning the game over to your side!

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE

ARTICLE

BY SIDDHARTHA GOVILK AR

Meet-ups come with a barrel of fun! Consider one

such meet-up, with 6 people, where two people
are friends if they know each other and strangers
otherwise. Now, in our little meet-up of 6 people,
each person isnt necessarily friends with every
other person, or (goes without saying), a stranger
to every other person . Suppose we draw lines
joining every pair of people in the room and colour
them blue if the two are friends, and colour them
red if they are strangers. We might get a scenario
similar to this:

strangers (red triangle)? In the scenario above, the

answer is yes. There does exist a red triangle between Trent, Mike and Mary thereby implying the
three are strangers to each other. But what if the
original graph had been different? Would we always have been able to find an orderly set of three
people? The answer to that too is yes. One way
of proving it is to list all possible colourings, and
check each one in turn. But in the case of 6 people,
there are over 30,000 such possible colourings!
This proof clearly is not the most efficient one and
is quite mind-taxing. An easier method is to first
choose any point in your graph, and note that five
lines come out of it - one to each of the other five
points:

These five lines are either coloured blue or red. So,

there must exist at least three lines of the same
colour (pigeon-hole principle). Without loss of generality, assume three lines out of five to be red.

An interesting question can be asked at this point

- in such a meet-up, can we find at least three people who are either all friends (blue triangle) or all

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Consider, these three lines for now.

Among the four points in the diagram on the left, if any one of the remaining three
lines is red, we have a red triangle. And if all of the remaining ones are blue, then we
have a blue triangle. Hence, proved.

Thus, for a meet-up of 6 (or more) people, there must be at least one group of three friends or of three
strangers. An obvious question now arises: what is the minimum number of people that we need to either find
a group of three friends or three strangers? This number is what we call as Ramseys number, and for this case
it is written as R(3,3). It is named after Frank Plumpton Ramsey, who was a great mathematician, philosopher
and economist. We can show that R(3,3) has to be 6, and any value less than 6 wont enable us to have a red
or a blue triangle. As for five points, there does exist the following case where we dont get a triangle of one
colour.
With a bit more computation, we can also prove that R(4,4) is 18. But,
can we be sure that there exists a definite value of R(a,b) for any given
a and b? The answer is yes, and that existence result is called Ramseys
theorem. However, with values like R(5,5) and greater numbers, we
cannot be completely sure. Considering the research that has been done
until now, we can at most predict that the value of R(5,5) lies somewhere
between 43 and 49.
One can ask why is it so difficult to get an accurate value. Well, the
arguments involve finding upper bounds and lower bounds. We saw
quite easily that R(3,3) could not be bigger than 6. But to show that it
could not be as small as 5, we had to construct a graph with 5 points, as
a counter-example. The problem is that we are looking for examples of
order, but the best counter-examples usually do have a lot of disorder. This makes it hard, and sometimes
impossible to find a hard and fast rule that gives good counter-examples. Anything constructed by rule will
probably have just too much order in it.
Another problem arises as the values of a and b in R(a,b) increase, because the upper bounds become too high.
Examining all possible graphs to show that one has the right number of friends or strangers is a mammoth
task. To show that R(5,5) is at most 49 we would have to look at 21176 possible colourings of a graph! This
number is far, far bigger than the number of particles known in the Universe. We just might never know the
answer to puzzle of this sort.
Joel Spencer, a combinatorialist who worked on Ramseys theory, once made a very popular quote, highlighting
how explosive the values of R(a,b) can become.

Erds asks us to imagine an alien force, vastly more powerful than us, landing on
Earth and demanding the value of R(5, 5) or they will destroy our planet. In that
case, he claims, we should marshal all our computers and all our mathematicians
and attempt to find the value. But suppose, instead, that they ask for R(6, 6). In that
case, he believes, we should attempt to destroy the aliens!

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THE WEIRSTRASS FUNCTION

ARTICLE

BY DR. ALPESH DHORAJIA

Theorem: There exists a real valued continuous

function defined on the real line
which is nowhere differentiable.

Can you imagine a real valued function which is

continuous but not differentiable? Well, if you remember the very first classes that you took on
continuity and differentiability of functions, you
should remember being the one which typically
comes to mind. is continuous everywhere on the
real line but not differentiable at x=0. At x=0, the
right hand derivative of this function is not equal to
the left hand derivative, thereby making the function not differentiable. The point x=0, is what we
call a corner or a kink in mathematical terms.
Now that we have recalled the definition of differentiability of a function, lets make things interesting a bit, shall we? Can you imagine a real valued
function which is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere? Now, however ill-posed or
counter-intuitive this may come across, a function
like this does exist and is called as the Weirstrass
Function, named after its discoverer Karl Weirstrass.

Proof:
To prove this result we will require the following
two theorems;
Theorem 1: Suppose
is a sequence of functions defined on an interval E, and suppose
(where
)
Then,
converges uniformly on E, if
converges.
Theorem 2: If
is a sequence of continuous
functions on E, and if
converges to f(x) then
f(x) is continuous on E.
Now,
Define
with
and extend
the definition of
to real x by requiring that
.
Then, for all
, it can be easily seen that
, which implies
is continuous
on .

This pathological function, was the first

published example (1872) which challenged the
notion that every continuous function is differentiable except at a set of isolated points. In this article, I have made an attempt to prove the existence
of such a function. Hold on tight, this is going to be
quite a ride!

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Now define,

...(*)

Since
, By Theorem 1, the series in (*) converges uniformly on
By Theorem 2, f(x) is continuous on .
Now, we claim that for any
, f(x) is not differentiable on x.
i.e.

does not exist at every x.

Let, m be a positive integer and

Take

be a fixed real number.

where the sign is chosen such that no integer lies between

This can be done, since
.

and

Define,

When, n>m, then

In that case,

as

is an even integer.
.

When 0nm,
..(since
Since
, we conclude that

As
.
Thus, it follows that f is not differentiable at x.
The graph of the Weirstrass function over the interval [-2,2] looks like this:

This function exhibits the property of self-similarity, i.e. every zoom is similar to the global plot.
The non-differentiability of the function can easily be spotted graphically as the curves has corners or
kinks at every point of R.

13

MATH IN VIDEO GAMES

ARTICLE

BY ABHISHEK SHRIVASTAVA

I think the topic of this article should be

enough for everyone (at least the game buffs)
to get glued on to it. It was, at least for me. It
is safe to say that videogames are an integral
part of every teenagers life. Havent you, assuming you have played some video game at
some point in your life, been a little curious to
know how a game is made? Let us start off by
answering your curiosity. There are many aspects to game creation. There is a staff of producers and publishers accompanied by a development team comprising of programmers,
artists, graphic designers, level designers and
testers. Our main focus in this article is on the
mathematics used by the development team,
primarily the programmers and designers.

attempt to bake. Without it, the cake wouldnt

rise. To illustrate my point, we will glance
through two types of games which are very
popular namely, First Person Shooter (FPS)
and Strategy Games.
First Person Shooter
It is a type of game where you run around
3D levels carrying a big gun shooting at objects. Examples of this sort of game include
Doom, Quake, Half Life etc. There are other
games that look very similar, but arent first
person shooters, for instance Zelda: Ocarina
of Time or Mario 64. The most amazing part
of an FPS are its incredible graphics. They look
almost real, and they would not have been
possible without the use of advanced math.
To understand how these games work, you
need to know a bit about geometry, vectors
and transformations. Geometry is the study of
shapes of various sort. The simplest shape is
the point. Another simple shape is a straight
line. A straight line is just the simplest shape
joining two points together. A plane is a more

Math is the foundation of game development.

It is involved in everything - from having the
ability to calculate the trajectory of an angry
bird flying through the sky to ensuring that
a character can jump and come back down
to ground. Without the help of mathematics,
games simply wouldnt work. To sum it up, it
is the flour to the cake that game developers

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complicated shape, it is a flat sheet, like a piece of paper or a wall. There are more complicated
shapes, called solids, like a cube or a sphere. A vector is a mathematical way of representing a
point in 3 dimension (space).
A transformation moves a point (or an object) from one place to another. For instance, if I move to
the right by 4 metres, this type of transformation is called a translation. Another type of transformation is rotation. If you take hold of an object (a pen for instance), and twist your wrist, you have
rotated that object. The basic idea of 3D graphics is to turn a mathematical description of a world
into a picture of what that world would look like to someone inside the world. Of course, there
is a lot more to it than just that: there is lighting, fog, animation, textures and hundreds of other
things. Most of these use Math and Physics to a large extent.
Strategy Games
The Strategy games are divided into two main types, Real Time Strategy, and Turn Based Strategy.
These games usually involve building and managing a city or civilization and also fighting wars by
controlling troops. Examples of real time strategy games are Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, Tiberian Sun. Examples of turn based strategy games are Civilization and Alpha Centauri.
Strategy games have much simpler graphics than FPS. So, they involve lesser usage of math in the
graphics aspect. However, these games deal with a completely different aspect of Mathematics
instead of geometry and vectors. When you click on a little soldier in a strategy game, and then
click somewhere else, telling him that he should walk to the place where you have clicked, what
happens inside the computer? How does the computer know how to make the soldier get from
where he already is to where he is going? Remember, computers cant think for themselves (yet!)
and so they need to be told exactly what to do. So you cant just say, look at the map and work
out the best route to wherever you are going. A computer needs exact instructions for every step
to be taken. This problem is called path finding. To explain how the computer works out the best
route, you need to know what nodes, edges and graphs are.
The simplest example of nodes and graphs is a map of some cities, and the roads between them
(or an underground map). Each city is a node, usually drawn as a circular blob. Each road is an
edge, and connects two nodes (cities), these are usually drawn as straight lines. The whole collection of nodes and edges (cities and roads) is called a graph. Sometimes there is a one way road,
called a directed edge, and we draw an arrow on it to show which way you can travel along it.
How does knowing about graphs help the computer guide troops around levels? It makes a graph
where every interesting point is a node on the graph, and every way of walking from one node to
another is an edge, and it then solves the corresponding path finding problem to guide the troops.
But it is not as easy as it sounds. For starters, what are the interesting points? You might think that
every position on the entire level is interesting, but for most games this would lead to hundreds of
thousands of interesting points, and finding the path would take years. Instead, the people making
the game decide where the interesting points are. For instance, if there is a wide open expanse (a
big field perhaps), you dont need a node at every point on the field, because the troops can walk
in a straight line across the field. Basically, you only need nodes around obstacles. Once you have
created a graph for a given map, the computer has to go through the following steps to guide the
troops. Firstly, it has to work out what the nearest node that the troop can walk to in a straight
line. This node is his starting node. Secondly, it has to work out the node which is nearest to his
destination. This node is the destination node. Thirdly, it works out the shortest path connecting
the starting node to the destination node. Now, all the troops have to do is walk to the starting
node, then walk along all the nodes between the starting node and the destination node, along the
connecting edges to their final destination. Generally, the computer assigns a cost to each path
taken depending upon the difficulty associated with the path. Hence comes the problem of finding
the path with the least cost.
So, we have seen two types of games which use different fields of math extensively. I hope these
illustrations were interesting enough to prove my premise regarding the exemplary authenticity
of Math in video games!

15

PAUL ERDS
MATHEMATICIAN IN FOCUS

BY DEVASHI GUL ATI

The stereotypical image of a prolific mathematician

might be antisocial, mostly on his desk and young.
Paul Erds was quite the exception. He was a
freelance mathematician.

Erdss Erds number is 0. Erdss coauthors have

Erds number 1. People other than Erds who
have written a joint paper with someone with
Erds number 1 but not with Erds have Erds
number 2, and so on. If there is no chain of co
authorships connecting someone with Erds, then
that persons Erds number is said to be infinite.

He had no home, no family, no possessions, no

address. He went from math conference to math
conference, from university to university, knocking
on the doors of mathematicians throughout the
world, declaring My brain is open and moving in.
His colleagues, grateful for a few days collaboration
with Erds - his mathematical breadth was as
impressive as his depth - took him in.
Erds wrote around 1,525 mathematical articles in
his lifetime, mostly with co-authors, more than any
other mathematician in history. An astonishing
legacy in a field where a lifetime product of 50
papers is considered extraordinary. He strongly
believed in and practiced mathematics as a social
activity.

Born to high-school mathematics teachers in

1913, Erds had two sisters, ages three and five,
who contracted scarlet fever and died the day he
was born. His mother, fearing that he, too, might
contract a fatal childhood disease, kept him home
from school until the age of 10. With his father
confined to a Russian prisoner-of-war camp for six
years and his mother working long hours, Erds
passed the time flipping through his parents
mathematics books. I fell in love with numbers at
a young age, Erds later recalled. They were my
friends. I could depend on them to always be there
and always behave in the same way.

Because of his prolific output, friends created the

Erds number as a humorous tribute. The Erds
number describes the collaborative distance
between a person and mathematician Paul Erds,
as measured by authorship of mathematical
papers.

Erds first did mathematics at the age of three,

but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since
the death of his mother when he was , he put in
nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with
10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong
espresso, and caffeine tablets. A mathematician,

16

Erds was fond of saying, is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. When friends urged him to slow
down, he always had the same response: Therell be plenty of time to rest in the grave.
To communicate with Erds you had to learn his language. When we met, said Martin Gardner, the
mathematical essayist, his first question was `When did you arrive? I looked at my watch, but Graham
whispered to me that it was Erdss way of asking, `When were you born? Erds often asked the same
question another way: When did the misfortune of birth overtake you? His language had a special
vocabulary--not just the SF and epsilon but also bosses (women), slaves (men), captured (married),
liberated (divorced), recaptured (remarried), noise (music), poison (alcohol), preaching (giving a
mathematics lecture), Sam (the United States), and Joe (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had
died, Erds meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had left,
the person had died.
He believed that God, whom he affectionately called the S.F. or Supreme Fascist, had a transfinite book
(transfinite being a mathematical concept for something larger than infinity) that contained the shortest,
most beautiful proof for every conceivable mathematical problem. The highest compliment he could pay
to a colleagues work was to say, Thats straight from The Book.
Erds never won the highest mathematical prize, the Fields Medal, nor did he coauthor a paper with
anyone who did, a pattern that extends to other prizes. He did win the Wolf Prize, where his contribution
is described as for his numerous contributions to number theory, combinatorics, probability, set theory
and mathematical analysis, and for personally stimulating mathematicians the world over. In contrast, the
works of the three winners after were recognized as outstanding, classic, and profound, and the three
before as fundamental or seminal. He was elected to many of the worlds most prestigious scientific
societies, including the Hungarian Academy of Science (1956), the U.S.National Academy of Sciences (1979),
and the British Royal Society (1989). Defying the conventional wisdom that mathematics was a young mans
game, Erds went on proving and conjecturing until the age of 83, succumbing to a heart attack only hours
after disposing of a nettlesome problem in geometry at a conference in Warsaw in 1996.

Vegre nem butulok tovabb

(Finally I am becoming stupider no more)

--the epitaph Paul Erds wrote for himself

17

THE GRAND HILBERT HOTEL

ARTICLE

BY JANVI PAL AN

In a mythical land, not more than a few decades

ago, there once stood a majestic hotel. The Hilbert
Grand, as they now call it, was majestic not only
in stature, but also in size. And what a tremendously large hotel it was! Room after room, floor
after floor, all stacked up to infinity. No, really.
The Hilbert Grand really contained infinitely many
rooms.

room 1312425632442346346 in a few moments, sir!

Lets get back to our grandiose setup. The Hilbert
Grand was started in 1924 by famous German
mathematician, David Hilbert, with a particularly odd liking for hotels and a fairly understandable curiosity towards infinity. Under the watchful
eyes of an exceptional night manager, business
boomed and soon, theyd reached a stage when all
the rooms of the hotel were completely booked.

Before we proceed further in the story, it is imperative to be clear about what infinitely many
rooms really constitutes. This story makes use of
the concept of a countable infinity, because the
rooms, though with a tendency to go towards the
undefined, are still numbered. Room 1 is followed
by room 2 is followed by room 3 and so on, but
each room is still numbered. A countable infinity
is when there is a One-One correspondence between a set and the set of natural numbers. To be
even simpler, in this case, it just means that there
exists a relation between one room number and a
natural number. As we have used natural numbers
for naming rooms, the existence of such a correspondence is quite clear. Counting the room numbers, or carrying food up the stairs to the infinite-th
room might take forever, but if you do happen to
know what room youre delivering to, then it can
be a finite time operation. One coffee coming to

One rainy night, a weary traveller walked into

the (fully booked) Grand Hilbert, seeking a place
to stay. He is informed that there is indeed room
for the guest at the hotel. Perplexing, in a way, because regardless of how there are infinitely many
rooms at the hotel, theyre still all occupied. But at
the Hilbert Grand, theres always room for everyone! How?
The guest cant be given the last room, since by
definition (or in this case, un-definition), all the
rooms are occupied. But since each room was
occupied by a guest, the manager requested the
guest in Room 1 to move to Room 2, the guest in
Room 2 to move to Room 3, the guest in Room n to
move to Room n + 1. Since the hotel had infinitely many rooms, there was no problem in moving,

18

there was always a room to move to. This left Room 1 vacant, and therefore, the guest was accommodated.
Motto still stands. Yay.
The next night, a bus of 60 passengers arrived and they asked for one room for each passenger. The same
thing happened. The manager requested the guest in Room 1 to move to Room 61, every guest in Room n
to move to Room n + 60. Since the hotel had infinitely many rooms, there was no problem in moving, there
was always a room to move to. This left 60 rooms vacant and therefore the hotel accommodated the 60 new
guests. Motto still stands. Yay.
The next night, a bus infinitely long with an infinite number of passengers arrived. This looked like a big
problem, but the manager shrugged it off. He requested the guest from Room 1 to move to Room 2, the
guest from Room 2 to move to Room 4, the guest from Room 3 to move to Room 6 and all the guest in Room
n to move to Room 2n. The guests didnt mind moving. This left all the rooms with odd numbers vacant,
which still meant an infinite number of rooms. Motto still stands. Yay.
In each of the above cases, there is a one-one correspondence between the number of rooms freed and the
number of passengers coming in. Take a look:

One night, the unthinkable happens. There appears to be, lined up outside the hotel, an infinitely long
queue of infinitely large buses. The type of infinity that we deal with is still, mind you, countable. If this
large number of passengers cannot be occupied, the hotel loses out on an infinite amount of money, and
the manager, his job. Under pressure, he is reminded of Euclids second theorem, stating that there are an
infinite number of prime numbers. So to accomplish this mammoth task of fitting in an infinite number of
people into his large hotel, he moves his guests in such a way that the person residing in room n is moved to
room number 2n. The hotel is assigned the prime number 2. Next, he assigns the prime number 3 to the first
bus. Each passenger in Bus 1 is moved to room number 3n, where n is their seat number. This goes on for
the next bus, with the next prime, and the bus after that, and then after that. Take a look above on the right.
Since each of the resulting room numbers has only one and the prime number base as its factors, there are
no overlapping room numbers. All the passengers are given unique room numbers, and the night manager
accomplishes his task. Of course, there are still rooms that are left vacant, such as Room 6, because it is not
a power of any prime, but alls well that ends well.
This situation is called the Infinite Hotel paradox and was created to demonstrate the counter-intuitive
properties of infinite sets. Thats a whole lot of trouble to go through just to have fun, what with building an
enormous hotel that probably required an infinite amount of time to make simply because youd never be
able to stop building it, because you wouldnt know when to!
The paradox of Hilberts Grand Hotel can be understood by using Cantors theory of transfinite numbers.
Thus, while in an ordinary (finite) hotel with more than one room, the number of odd-numbered rooms is
obviously smaller than the total number of rooms, over at Hilbert Grand Hotel, the quantity of odd-numbered rooms is not smaller than total number of rooms. In mathematical terms, the cardinality of the
subset containing the odd-numbered rooms is the same as the cardinality of the set of all rooms. Indeed,
infinite sets are characterized as sets that have proper subsets of the same cardinality. For countable sets
(sets with the same cardinality as the natural numbers) this cardinality is , or Aleph zero.
This sort of arrangement isnt always possible. If instead we used real numbers, then in that form of infin-

19

ity, these structured strategies would fail, because we

have no organized way of
including all numbers. We
would have to have negative
rooms (in the basement),
rational number rooms (like
room 8/9, which never really seems just as big as the
room to its left), and room
Pi, where the guests expect
free dessert!
Now I doubt anyone would
want to work at such a giant
mess, even for an infinitely
large salary.
These cases constitute a paradox not in the sense that
they entail a logical contradiction, but in the sense that
they demonstrate a counter-intuitive result that is provably true: the statements there is a guest to every
room and no more guests can be accommodated are not equivalent when there are infinitely many
rooms. What the infinite hotel paradox goes to show is, quite simply, how difficult it is for our minds to get
a grasp over infinity.

Homer: This time tomorrow, youll be wearing high heels!

Ned: Nope, you will.
Homer: Fraid not.
Ned: Fraid so!
Homer: Fraid not.
Ned: Fraid so!
Homer: Fraid not infinity!
Ned: Fraid so infinity plus one!
Homer: Doh!
If it left even noted mathematical genius, Homer Simpson, stumped, what good are our simple minds?

20

SQUARE VALUES OF MATH EXPRN.

ABSTR AC T OF A LEC TURE BY DR. MANJUL BHARGAVA IN TECHFEST AT IIT BOMBAY

BY JITEN AMAR AHUJA

admitting real values will result in a perfect

square? And if it has solutions, how often do we
get them?
------------------------------ (1)

This is an abstract from the lecture given by Dr.Manjul

Bhargava in Techfest at IIT Bombay on 4th January,
2015. The title of the lecture was : Square values of
mathematical expressions from ancient times.

Or more generally,

Mathematics can be divided into two broad

branches- Applied Mathematics and Pure
Mathematics. Applied mathematics, the one which
most of us like to study and understand, deals with
mathematical methods that find use in science,
engineering, business, computer science, and
industry. Pure mathematics deals with abstract
entities with respect to their intrinsic nature,
without being concerned with how they manifest
in the real world.

When is it that a mathematical expression

admitting real values will result in a perfect
power?
-------------------------------- (2)
The first known attempt at solving question (1)
goes back to 2500 BC in Egypt. The megalithic
monuments contain right-angled triangles with
side-lengths of integral values. Another example
is that of the Plimpton 322 Tablet dating back to
1800 BC. The Mesopotamian tablet lists some huge
numbers which satisfy the property
. The
magnitude of these numbers suggests that they
must have known a method to find what we call as
Pythagorean triplets.

This article deals with one of the topics in pure

mathematics whose fundamental question is
highly recreational in nature and which has been
instrumental in shaping the very structure of pure
mathematics. Pure Mathematics is something that
exists for its own sake. Much of it doesnt have
any immediate application in the real world. Most
of it has been developed only by some generic
questions. Questions simple enough to understand
but quite difficult to crack. One of them is When is it that a mathematical expression

21

The Plimpton 322 Tablet

The numbers on the Tablet

Some other early well-known examples of the attempts made at (1) are as follows:
1) Baudhayana-Pythagoras Theorem: When is

2) Pells Equation*: How to find all the square values of the form

3) Fermats Last Theorem: For what non-zero integral values of a,b,c and integral values of n does the relation
hold? Note that finding rational a, b and c for the above expression can also be considered
as an alternate question.
4) Ramanujan-Nagell Equation: Ramanujans question was show that
is a square only when n=3,
4, 5, 7, 15. This question was open for 35 years until it was solved by Nagell using methods previously unknown. As is with most of the questions posed by Ramanujan, the above is the only equation with 5 solutions for the kind
with a, b and n integers such that
is a perfect square. Rest have at most 2
solutions in n for a=2 and fixed b, unless b=7.
We shall now move on to the topic of hyperelliptic and elliptic curves. The simplest kind of a square equation
is that of a hyperelliptic curve.
If
a solution.
Now,

be a hyperelliptic curve and (x,y) is a solution; then (x,-y) is also

has no rational solution whereas

has infinitely many rational solutions.

The question arises - How many rational solutions can a hyperelliptic equation have?
It has been proved that hyperelliptic curves have
1. Infinitely many or no solution if n=1,2.

2. Finite or infinitely many if n=3,4.

3. Finite if n 5
An algorithm is known for how to find the solutions in the case of n=1, 2 but not for n 3. In particular, if
n=3, 4 one cannot say whether there will be finite or infinite solutions.
The question remainsIf random equations are taken, what is the probability that there will be finitely many or infinitely many solutions?
Elliptic curves are a special case of hyperelliptic curves with n=3. Elliptic curves have been used to find the
solution of Fermats Last Theorem.

22

The speciality of elliptic curves is that they naturally form a group under
addition**. The group law is constructed geometrically but has got nothing
to do with ellipses or conic sections at all. In simpler geometrical terms,
what this group law means is that if you take a reflection of the point, the
point that is the intersection of the line joining two points on the curve and
the curve, will also lie on the curve. This figure might help you understand
what this exactly means.
Let E:

Do the elliptic curves in E when ordered in a particular manner tend to have finitely many or infinitely many
rational solutions?
The answers for above questions have been provided by Dr.Manjul Bhargava in association with others.
Theorem: (Dr.Manjul Bhargava, Charles Skinner, 2013)
When all elliptic curves E:
are ordered in a particular manner, there is a greater than 20% probability that there will be infinitely many rational solutions.
Dr.Manjul Bhargava conjectures that above two theorems holds for n = 4 too.
Theorem: (Dr.Manjul Bhargava, Gross, Poonen-Stoll + pre-print)
For n 6, most (>50%) hyperelliptic curves have no rational points as their solutions. It can be said that as n
increases, number of solutions decreases exponentially.
For n=10, 99% equations have no solutions.
As far as equations with degree 5 are concerned, there havent been any significant results proved as of yet.
With the accomplishment of the above task, we will inch closer to solving the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
Conjecture which is one of the unsolved Millennium problems.

* To read more, refer to the chapter XXVIII Indeterminate Equations of the Second Degree in Higher Algebra by Hall and Knight
** If a, b and c belong to a set G, they are said to form a group under addition if all the elements of G satisfy following 4 properties:

1.
2.
3.
4.

. such that
such that

23

Interview
WITH KRUTIKA TAWRI
We had the pleasure of interacting with Krutika Tawri, a fellow Mathematics student of the 2011 batch who is currently
doing her final year thesis at the National University of Singapore. During her journey here at BITS Goa, she also dropped
her second degree in (the lucrative) Computer Science, keeping her best interests in mind. Convergence tries to find out
how she went on about landing a thesis at a great university like NUS, her experience of studying mathematics here, and
what really gets her ticking.
Q. You dropped your engineering dual of Computer Science. Could you take us through the pros and cons
which you had to consider while taking that decision?
Krutika Tawri: Well, I sort of knew even before I came to BITS that I wanted to study pure mathematics. So the decision that I took made more sense because it would give me a lot more time to invest in it. Having CS would have
definitely given me more options but I think it would have been too time consuming.
Q. Could you tell us your exact thesis topic and how you went on about securing a thesis at NUS?
Krutika Tawri: Here, Im working on isoperimetric inequality in two and three dimensions and its application in
understanding partial differential equations(PDEs). The scope of my thesis is basically understanding the proofs of
the inequality and later trying to prove it on my own and then apply it to solving the heat equation. What I did to
get this thesis is email a few professors working in the field of PDEs. A couple of them agreed to mentor me. I also
had a good project in the same field, which is what I think worked for me. Also as far as I know, ones CGPA does
not matter when you are applying for a thesis or looking for summer internships in pure Math. I dont think I even
had to mention mine in my resume. So the only indicator of your capability is research and experience.
Q. Which Math courses, apart from Partial Differential Equations, do you recommend one should do well
in to go about in your field?
Krutika Tawri: Complex and Real analysis, Functional Analysis, Ordinary Differential Equations, Partial Differential
Equations and Topology.
Q. Could you give us a brief outline regarding the most ethical way of approaching professors of such big
universities regarding thesis?
Krutika Tawri: Well, mail only the ones who are working in the field you are interested to work in. Be polite. Try not
bombarding them with multiple emails, and be precise.
Q. Did you do a summer internship after your third year? Does that help in getting a thesis?
Krutika Tawri: Yes, I did pursue a summer internship at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai. It
probably must have helped me a lot. I worked with two professors there. Initially, I started working under Prof. Anilesh Mohari by studying Cantors construction of real numbers using axiom of choice and expanded it to Von-Neumanns construction of Hilbert spaces. This helped me understand the Fourier series better which I applied into
studying the heat equation. Then I went on to work under Prof. Kesavan Srinivasan, under whom I studied about
the Fourier transform and Schwartz spaces from the book Topics in Functional Analysis and Applications.
Q. You have seen the Mathematics research here at BITS Goa and also at NUS. What are the things that
you think we can improve upon?
Krutika Tawri: I havent been involved in NUS as a student as such, so i cant make a fair comment. I feel that maybe
teachers can be a bit more welcoming and encouraging to accepting students for projects, because those help a
lot.

24

Puzzles
1. A man owned a large, square, fenced-in field in which there were sixteen oak trees,
as depicted in the illustration. He wished, for some eccentric reason, to put up five
straight fences, so that every tree should be in a separate enclosure. How did he do
it? Just take your pencil and draw five straight strokes across the field, so that every
tree shall be fenced off from all the others. See figure on the left.

2. You have a piece of cheese in the shape of a cube. How can you cut it in two
pieces with one straight cut of the knife so that the two new surfaces produced
by the cut shall each be a perfect hexagon? Of course, if you cut in the direction
of the dotted line the surfaces would be squares, now produce hexagons.
3. Find the four digit number x that satisfies these two properties:

i. The digits of x add up to a number y where x equals y times the number you get when you reverse the digits of y.

ii. Reverse the digits of x and find the prime factors of the number you get. Then take the sum of the
squares of these prime factors and halve it. Removing the digit 0 from the new number yields back x.
4. The Nurikabe puzzle:
Grid cells must be filled in so that all the black cells form one contiguous region, not counting squares touching at a corner to be adjacent, but it is not allowed to have a two by two square of black cells. Finally, each connected region of unfilled cells must contain exactly one number, which tells how many unfilled cells there are.
On the left is an example puzzle and its only solution.


Solve this one now :

25

Comics

26

Puzzles Solutions

1. On the left.

2. Mark the mid-points in BC, CH, HE, EF, FG, and

GB. Then insert the knife at the top and follow the
direction indicated by the dotted plane. Then the
two surfaces will each be a perfect hexagon, and
the piece on the right will, in perspective, resemble
Figure 2.
3. 1729

4. Figure On the left.

27

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Editorial Team
Siddhartha Govilkar
Janvi Palan
Rutuja Surve
Devashi Gulati
Design
Bhavul Gauri
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