Jack Gray
The ephemeral nature of fame is one lesson to be drawn from the life of Edmond Halley (1656-1742).
Keith D. Cole
All the predictions are that Halley's comet in 1986 will not be the heavenly spectacle that it was in 1910.
Jim Franklin
Acts of Parliament are allowed to contain words but not mathematical formulas
March 4/5 were the dates for the 1986 Australian Mathematics Olympiad.
In this issue we consider some problems in the applications of mathematics found in the 1985 3 unit and 4 unit papers.
Q.660 A jailer walks times past a row of cells walking always from left to right.
Q.636 In the play off match for the chess club championship between the three players who had finished level after the preliminary tournament, each pair played the same number of games.
K. N. R. Taylor
Halley, like Newton, Darwin, Einstein and many others, is one of the few scientists whose names are familiar to us all.
Linus has a litre flask of pure orange juice and and empty litre flask.
Q.672 Find the least natural number whose last digit is 6 such that it increases by the factor 4 when this last digit is carried to the beginning of the number.
Q.648 Prove that no perfect square except 0 is the product of 6 consecutive integers.
Michael Cowling
I propose to describe how computer science depends heavily on mathematics, and how mathematics has been revolutionised by the advent of the computer.
Tony Shannon
We start with the sieve of Eratosthenes for generating primes, and then look at other ways of sieving the integers.
John Mack and John Loxton
Ramanujan was an Indian and a very original mathematician.
The diagram on page 24 features a cross-section of the shell of a Pearly Nautilus, showing a remarkable example of a curve known as the equiangular, or logarithmic, spiral.
In this issue we first look at two problems, set in 1985, which use mathematical induction.
Q.684 is an obtuse angle. A circle through cuts at and at .
Q.660 A jailer walks times past a row of cells walking always from left to right.