Abstract
There is a story to the effect that the students of a famous mathematician presented him with the sequence 32, 38, 44, 48, 56, 60 and asked for the next member. It was also stipulated that the properties of the sequence were very well known to the professor and that the generating principle was quite simple. The mathematician, failing to find anything but a fairly complicated polynomial fit, gave up. The answer was “Meadowlark,” this being the next stop on the city’s subway -- elevated after 60th Street. The problem was “fair,” because the professor rode this conveyance daily and hence “knew” very well the principle of the sequence.
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© 1970 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Churchman, C.W. (1970). The Role of Weltanschauung in Problem Solving and Inquiry. In: Banerji, R.B., Mesarovic, M.D. (eds) Theoretical Approaches to Non-Numerical Problem Solving. Lecture Notes in Operations Research and Mathematical Systems, vol 28. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-99976-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-99976-5_5
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