What’s in the Bag?

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Mathematics

Publication Date

5-21-2021

Abstract

The Ross-Littlewood paradox describes a process of repeatedly adding and then removing chips from a bag. During the process, the size of the bag grows at each step; but at the end of the process, the bag is mysteriously found to be empty. This paper explores some new questions about which sets of chips could remain in the bag at the end of the process as well as some stochastic question not pursued in Ross' work. The results presented in this paper were all proven by undergraduate students at the author's institution as the students learned to work with quantifiers, uncountable sets, perfect subsets of the real line, probability, recurrence relations, and measure theory for the first time.

Comments

This article was originally published in The College Mathematics Journal. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

The College Mathematics Journal

Copyright

© The Mathematical Association of America

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