Championship
Here you've got a selection of fun and curious brain-teasers, mathematical diversions and amusements that combine
the world of football with logic and mathematics. Click on the 'problem' if you want
to see the related quiz.
| no. | Problem | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Mesut Özil and the Fermat point | Geometry |
| 1 | And now, who should kick de penalty? | The Simpson's paradox |
| 2 | The Golden Goalkeeper | The Arrow's paradox |
| 3 | Does anybody tell the truth? | Logical thinking |
| 4 | Llorente's hard decision | Taking decisions |
| 5 | A benefit match | Arithmetic mean |
| 6 | Do you dare to count? A forward-and-back problem | Logical thinking |
| 7 | The fantastic pencil of Sir Alex Ferguson | Champernowne constant |
| 8 | Beckham and the reserve player's chance | The problem of Monty Hall |
| 9 | Which team will win the Champions? | Inverse probability |
| 10 | The prodigious memory of Van Bommel | Bolzano's theorem |
| 11 | The importance of a flag | Conditioned probability |
| 12 | The Juventus and the Chinese grass | Rule of three |
| 13 | Ribéry's strange training | Even and odd |
| 14 | Guardiola: the last training session | Lateral thinking |
| 15 | Eurobirthdays 2012 | Birthday paradox |
| 16 | The troubled stadium gates | Progressions |
We encourage you to solve them, by dedicating a few minutes before seeing the solution!
Riddles are ordered from top to bottom by the number of visits to each of them, and by your preferences about the teasers that you send us by e-mail, facebook or twitter.
We place the newest riddle on the top, just for you find it more easily.
Finally, we thank you very much everyone for collaborating with us. Your vote is very helpful to let us know what kind of puzzles you like best, and so we'd offer you related problems.
Go to the second part to learn more about this web
SECOND HALF
Thank you for visiting this website.
Here you will find funny riddles in which we mix the world of logic and mathematics with the world of football. Different mathematical concepts and paradoxes, logic problems and lateral thinking puzzles are developed in them.
With these amusements we hope you have fun and entertainment, while you get acquainted with the lighter side of mathematics, and so contribute to the populariztion of mathematics, to turn it into a trend.
Generally mathematics are explained in a classic form, from a too formal and academic sphere. This makes people come to them with 'fear' and apprehension: if it falls in our hands a book of mathematics, we begin to see strange symbols, unknown and incomprehensible, almost magical, as if the book was written in a foreign language or like it was a book of formulas and incantations of an alchemist.
Thus, we hastily close the book and keep it in the bottom of the bookshelf. And if after a while we pick it up again, we can check with displeasure that the passage of time has not erased these strange symbols and those unintelligible explanations, but they are still there, waiting for us to re-open the book to frightening us again.
As in horror films, mathematics books resemble those rooms in which nobody dares to enter, and that as one approaches to turning the doorknob, some tenebrous compasses begin to sound indicating that we won't find anything good at the other side.
We've thought about actualizing and presenting those maths problems in a playful way, with football puzzles. Nowadays this sport is followed by millions of supporters who devore with relish goals statistics, percentages of ball possessions, probabilities of advancing to the next stage of the competition, etc. And this is the same people who have cornered those maths books on the self. So, we think that by presenting the various mathematical theorems in a ludic way with problems adapted to football, we can get a little more interest about these matters.
Here you will find some problems more difficult than others, but we can say that all of them are suitable for all audiences. You don't need any prior knowledge, anyone between 8 and 100 years can try to solve them but only with the desire of having some fun. In all cases it's worth dedicate some time to solve the passtimes we propose by yourselves, before going to see the solution.
In every problem, its solution will be acompanied by a mote 'tecnic' explanation, in other color, for those interested in further exploring the subject of each puzzle. This second solution is suitable for students, teachers, Maths' lovers and curious people in general.
We hope you enjoy it, and we thank you in advance for any suggestion, nuance or críticism that you may fulfill, through our facebook or twitter pages.
Our website is dedicated to all those who, prior to our discrete collaboration to the field of recreational mathematics, have developed a comprehensive outreach and approach to the world of logic, common sense and mathematics to the general public.
And we especially thank those whose work has directly inspirated our puzzles: doctors Martin Gardner, Adrián Paenza, Malba Tahan, Pablo Amster, Clifford A. Pickower, Thomas H. Sidebotham, Raymond Smullyan, Debkumar Mitra, Claudi Alsina, among others.
P.D. The responsible for all the errors of this website is Herminio López.
Thank you very much everybody.
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Matifutbol by Herminio López Arroyo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.