, Columnist
Kominers's Conundrums: What Comes Next in the Sequence?
A numerical sequence might not be about numbers at all.
That's some lazy catering right there.
Photographer: Arnold Reinhold via Wikimedia Commons
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Numbers are everywhere: in grocery prices, our transit routes, the Bloomberg Terminal (of course). We have a tendency to try to find order in all of them. Often, that’s a futile exercise — most numbers in our lives are pretty random. But sometimes, the patterns are real.
Numerical patterns are the foundation of what — as far as I can remember — is the first type of puzzle I ever solved: sequence problems.