Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Brendan, Martin Gardner has a great reputation. IMO he's a master of "layman" or "recreational" mathematics, posing and expounding on problems that can be attacked without a great deal of technical background.

On a narrow point, Brendan’s original post mentioning Chambers as an authority referred to the Thesaurus, not the Dictionary. The word in question seems to be supported by the former, and not the latter, which is what I think qualifies as the authority. I think a listing in a thesaurus performs a rather different function to a definition in a dictionary

Leaving aside the crossword itself, which is usually an education. Every Saturday, even at ten to midnight as it is where I am right now, I go to bed having learned so much more on top. Thank you all for your contributions. I feel there are things I need to gen up on as a result of today. A presto as they say in these parts.

Geeker, Martin Gardner is certainly known on this side of the pond. I still have a copy of “Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions” which I read at school. But I reluctantly agree with your qualification “of a certain age”!

I'm definitely a layman compared to you guys when it comes to maths (or 'math' as Geeker and Darla might say), but I've always had a fascination with probability theory and am a fan of Thomas Bayes. I love how counter-intuitive it can appear.

For example, the number of people needed before there's a greater than 50% chance that 2 people will share the same birthday.

Or the famous Monty Hall problem. In fact, in Bernoulli's Fallacy that I mentioned earlier, it publishes several of the angry and derisive letters and complaints that Marilyn vos Savant received for pointing out what must to you guys seem obvious. I think one was from the entire maths faculty at an Ivy league college.

Another is the total misunderstanding, not least by doctors, as to what a drug having a 1% false positive rate actually means.

I am starting to go down a bit of a rabbit hole, though - I suppose it was inevitable! I'm now somewhat obsessed with the 'crisis in statistics', P-values, null hypotheses etc. and the staggeringly low replication rates of previous studies.

Looking at Chambers dictionary, “hypothesis” definitions 2 and 3 appear to me to be equivalent to [solution] definition 2.

You are quite right, Jono. I didn’t read properly. My apologies. I don’t think scientists will accept the looseness of the second definition of the answer, and I quite understand why, but it is in there, so it’s fair game.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, when I was a teenager, I spent goodness how many hours poring through Martin Gardener's books. I remember following his instructions to create hexaflexagons and tetraflexagons, and being totally fascinated by them. The books were an enormous formative influence on me. Sigh... memories...

I remember avidly reading his column in Scientific American. I also have a book called Metamagical Themas (geddit)!

Sorry to bring interesting conversation back to crossword, but I have t-i-e-t- for 16d. Is that correct? Am finding this pretty hard and convoluted………