Keith Mellinger
Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, together with a colleague from Kean University in N.J., recently published “The Spider and the Fly” in the College Mathematics Journal, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America.
The Spider and the Fly puzzle, originally attributed to the great puzzler Henry Ernest Dudeney, and now over 100 years old, asks for the shortest path between two points on a particular square prism. The authors explore a generalization, find that the original solution only holds in certain cases, and suggest how this discovery might be used in the classroom.
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