arXiv subjects

Stan Wagon

Publications and source records attributed to Stan Wagon.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Minimalist Approach to Rolling Wheels

In 1960, G. B. Robison discovered the general equations relating roads and wheels, where either can have an unusual shape (e.g., the square wheel rolls smoothly on a catenary). But he used some inobvious assumptions regarding the meaning of rolling. Here we derive the equations for the road appropriate for a given wheel using only the single assumption that rolling occurs with no slipping. We do not require that the wheel be differentiable, so this allows the construction of a wheel-road pair when the wheel is a continuous nowhere differentiable function.

math.CA↗

arXiv2025

A Spiral Bicycle Track that Can Be Traced by a Unicycle

A unibike curve is a track that can be made by either a bicycle or a unicycle. More precisely, the end of a unit tangent vector at any point on a unibike curve lies on the curve (so the bike's front wheel always lies on the track made by the rear wheel). David Finn found such a curve in 2002, but it loops around itself in an extremely complicated way with many twists and self-intersections. Starting with the polar square root curve r = sqrt[t/(2 pi)] and iterating a simple construction involving a differential equation apparently leads in the limit to a unibike curve having a spiral shape. The iteration gets each curve as a rear track of its predecessor. Solving hundreds of differential equations numerically, where each depends on the preceding one, leads to error buildup, but with some care one can get a curve having unibike error less than 10^-7. The evidence is strong for the conjecture that the limit of the iteration exists and is a unibike curve.

math.DG↗

arXiv2024

A Catalog of Facially Complete Graphs

Considering regions in a map to be adjacent when they have nonempty intersection (as opposed to the traditional view requiring intersection in a linear segment) leads to the concept of a facially complete graph: a plane graph that becomes complete when edges are added between every two vertices that lie on a face. Here we present a complete catalog of facially complete graphs: they fall into seven types. A consequence is that if q is the size of the largest face in a plane graph G that is facially complete, then G has at most Floor[3/2 q] vertices. This bound was known, but our proof is completely different from the 1998 approach of Chen, Grigni, and Papadimitriou. Our method also yields a count of the 2-connected facially complete graphs with n vertices. We also show that if a plane graph has at most two faces of size 4 and no larger face, then the addition of both diagonals to each 4-face leads to a graph that is 5-colorable.

math.CO↗

arXiv2019

Littlewood Polynomials, Spectral-Null Codes, and Equipowerful Partitions

Let $[n]$ denote $\{0,1, ... , n-1\}$. A polynomial $f(x) = \sum a_i x^i$ is a Littlewood polynomial (LP) of length $n$ if the $a_i$ are $\pm 1$ for $i \in [n]$, and $a_i = 0$ for $i \ge n$. Such an LP is said to have order $m$ if it is divisible by $(x-1)^m$. The problem of finding the set $L_m$ of lengths of LPs of order $m$ is equivalent to finding the lengths of spectral-null codes of order $m$, and to finding $n$ such that $[n]$ admits a partition into two subsets whose first $m$ moments are equal. Extending the techniques and results of Boyd and others, we completely determine $L_7$ and $L_8$ and prove that 192 is the smallest element of $L_9$. Our primary tools are the use of carefully targeted searches using integer linear programming (both to find LPs and to disprove their existence for specific $n$ and $m$), and an unexpected new concept (that arose out of observed symmetry properties of LPs) that we call "regenerative pairs," which produce infinite arithmetic progressions in $L_m$. We prove that for $m \le$ 8, whenever there is an LP of length $n$ and order $m$, there is one of length $n$ and order $m$ that is symmetric (resp.~antisymmetric) if m is even (resp.~odd).

math.NT↗

arXiv2019

Too Many Hats

A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and to Steiner systems and other designs. A natural conjecture is that perfect hat-guessing strategies exist in all cases, where "perfect" means that the success probability is 1/(k+1). This is true when k = 1, but we show that it is false when k = 2. Further, we present a strategy with success rate at least 1/O(k log k), independent of the number of prisoners.

math.CO↗

arXiv2019

Repeatedly Appending Any Digit to Generate Composite Numbers

We investigate the problem of finding integers $k$ such that appending any number of copies of the base-ten digit $d$ to $k$ yields a composite number. In particular, we prove that there exist infinitely many integers coprime to all digits such that repeatedly appending {\it any} digit yields a composite number.

math.NT↗

arXiv2016

The Quadrahelix: A Nearly Perfect Loop of Tetrahedra

In 1958, S. Świerczkowski proved that there cannot be a closed loop of congruent interior-disjoint regular tetrahedra that meet face-to-face. Such closed loops do exist for the other four regular polyhedra. It has been conjectured that, for any positive ε, there is a tetrahedral loop such that its difference from a closed loop is less than ε. We prove this conjecture by presenting a very simple pattern that can generate loops of tetrahedra in a rhomboid shape having arbitrarily small gap. Moreover, computations provide explicit examples where the error is under $10^{-100}$ or $10^{-10^{6}}$. The explicit examples arise from a certain Diophantine relation whose solutions can be found through continued fractions; for more complicated patterns a lattice reduction technique is needed.

math.MG↗

arXiv2016

Properties, Proved and Conjectured, of Keller, Mycielski, and Queen Graphs

We prove several results about three families of graphs. For queen graphs, defined from the usual moves of a chess queen, we find the edge-chromatic number in almost all cases. In the unproved case, we have a conjecture supported by a vast amount of computation, which involved the development of a new edge-coloring algorithm. The conjecture is that the edge-chromatic number is the maximum degree, except when simple arithmetic forces the edge-chromatic number to be one greater than the maximum degree. For Mycielski graphs, we strengthen an old result that the graphs are Hamiltonian by showing that they are Hamilton-connected (except M(3), which is a cycle). For Keller graphs G(d), we establish, in all cases, the exact value of the chromatic number, the edge-chromatic number, and the independence number, and we get the clique covering number in all cases except 5 <= d <= 7. We also investigate Hamiltonian decompositions of Keller graphs, obtaining them up to G(6).

math.CO↗

arXiv2010

How to lose as little as possible

Suppose Alice has a coin with heads probability $q$ and Bob has one with heads probability $p>q$. Now each of them will toss their coin $n$ times, and Alice will win iff she gets more heads than Bob does. Evidently the game favors Bob, but for the given $p,q$, what is the choice of $n$ that maximizes Alice's chances of winning? The problem of determining the optimal $N$ first appeared in \cite{wa}. We show that there is an essentially unique value $N(q,p)$ of $n$ that maximizes the probability $f(n)$ that the weak coin will win, and it satisfies $\frac{1}{2(p-q)}-\frac12\le N(q,p)\le \frac{\max{(1-p,q)}}{p-q}$. The analysis uses the multivariate form of Zeilberger's algorithm to find an indicator function $J_n(q,p)$ such that $J>0$ iff $n<N(q,p)$ followed by a close study of this function, which is a linear combination of two Legendre polynomials. An integration-based algorithm is given for computing $N(q,p)$.

math.CO↗