Student-professor duo share love for math, puzzles
In theory, math should be fun, right?
“Yes” is most definitely the answer if you ask Ken Price, associate math professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and his student John Dewitt, a senior secondary education math major.
Together — and with the help of the Student Titan Employment Program (STEP) — the duo came together to both share their love of mathematics as well as to research a type of puzzle that Price had previously created called an arrowgram.
An arrowgram is a type of mathematical puzzle consisting of letters connected by arrows. The arrows point from one letter to another. Some arrows are labeled with numbers, and a rule based on transitivity (a relationship between three elements such that if the relationship holds between the first and second elements and between the second and third elements, it necessarily holds between the first and third elements) is used to label the rest of the arrows.
“My motivation to invent arrowgrams was to find a way to communicate some aspects of my scholarship to people besides mathematicians,” Price said. “I was looking to have people do math that was fun.”
