mscroggs.co.uk
mscroggs.co.uk

subscribe

Blog

World Cup stickers 2018, pt. 3

 2018-07-07 
So you've calculated how much you should expect the World Cup sticker book to cost and recorded how much it actually cost. You might be wondering what else you can do with your sticker book. If so, look no further: this post contains 5 mathematical things involvolving your sticker book and stickers.

Test the birthday paradox

Stickers 354 and 369: Alisson and Roberto Firmino
In a group of 23 people, there is a more than 50% chance that two of them will share a birthday. This is often called the birthday paradox, as the number 23 is surprisingly small.
Back in 2014 when Alex Bellos suggested testing the birthday paradox on World Cup squads, as there are 23 players in a World Cup squad. I recently discovered that even further back in 2012, James Grime made a video about the birthday paradox in football games, using the players on both teams plus the referee to make 23 people.
In this year's sticker book, each player's date of birth is given above their name, so you can use your sticker book to test it out yourself.

Kaliningrad

Sticker 022: Kaliningrad
One of the cities in which games are taking place in this World Cup is Kaliningrad. Before 1945, Kaliningrad was called Königsberg. In Königsburg, there were seven bridges connecting four islands. The arrangement of these bridges is shown below.
The people of Königsburg would try to walk around the city in a route that crossed each bridge exactly one. If you've not tried this puzzle before, try to find such a route now before reading on...
In 1736, mathematician Leonhard Euler proved that it is in fact impossible to find such a route. He realised that for such a route to exist, you need to be able to pair up the bridges on each island so that you can enter the island on one of each pair and leave on the other. The islands in Königsburg all have an odd number of bridges, so there cannot be a route crossing each bridge only once.
In Kaliningrad, however, there are eight bridges: two of the original bridges were destroyed during World War II, and three more have been built. Because of this, it's now possible to walk around the city crossing each bridge exactly once.
A route around Kaliningrad crossing each bridge exactly once.
I wrote more about this puzzle, and using similar ideas to find the shortest possible route to complete a level of Pac-Man, in this blog post.

Sorting algorithms

If you didn't convince many of your friends to join you in collecting stickers, you'll have lots of swaps. You can use these to practice performing your favourite sorting algorithms.

Bubble sort

In the bubble sort, you work from left to right comparing pairs of stickers. If the stickers are in the wrong order, you swap them. After a few passes along the line of stickers, they will be in order.
Bubble sort

Insertion sort

In the insertion sort, you take the next sticker in the line and insert it into its correct position in the list.
Insertion sort

Quick sort

In the quick sort, you pick the middle sticker of the group and put the other stickers on the correct side of it. You then repeat the process with the smaller groups of stickers you have just formed.
Quick sort

The football

Sticker 007: The official ball
Sticker 007 shows the official tournament ball. If you look closely (click to enlarge), you can see that the ball is made of a mixture of pentagons and hexagons. The ball is not made of only hexagons, as road signs in the UK show.
Stand up mathematician Matt Parker started a petition to get the symbol on the signs changed, but the idea was rejected.
If you have a swap of sticker 007, why not stick it to a letter to your MP about the incorrect signs as an example of what an actual football looks like.

Psychic pets

Speaking of Matt Parker, during this World Cup, he's looking for psychic pets that are able to predict World Cup results. Why not use your swaps to label two pieces of food that your pet can choose between to predict the results of the remaining matches?
Timber using my swaps to wrongly predict the first match
                        
(Click on one of these icons to react to this blog post)

You might also enjoy...

Comments

Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.
@Matthew: Thank you for the calculations. Good job I ordered the stickers I wanted #IRN. 2453 stickers - that's more than the number you bought (1781) to collect all stickers!
Milad
                 Reply
@Matthew: Here is how I calculated it:

You want a specific set of 20 stickers. Imagine you have already \(n\) of these. The probability that the next sticker you buy is one that you want is
$$\frac{20-n}{682}.$$
The probability that the second sticker you buy is the next new sticker is
$$\mathbb{P}(\text{next sticker is not wanted})\times\mathbb{P}(\text{sticker after next is wanted})$$
$$=\frac{662+n}{682}\times\frac{20-n}{682}.$$
Following the same method, we can see that the probability that the \(i\)th sticker you buy is the next wanted sticker is
$$\left(\frac{662+n}{682}\right)^{i-1}\times\frac{20-n}{682}.$$
Using this, we can calculate the expected number of stickers you will need to buy until you find the next wanted one:
$$\sum_{i=1}^{\infty}i \left(\frac{20-n}{682}\right) \left(\frac{662+n}{682}\right)^{i-1} = \frac{682}{20-n}$$
Therefore, to get all 682 stickers, you should expect to buy
$$\sum_{n=0}^{19}\frac{682}{20-n} = 2453 \text{ stickers}.$$
Matthew
                 Reply
@Matthew: Yes, I would like to know how you work it out please. I believe I have left my email address in my comment. It seems like a lot of stickers if you are just interested in one team.
Milad
                 Reply
@Milad: Following a similiar method to this blog post, I reckon you'd expect to buy 2453 stickers (491 packs) to get a fixed set of 20 stickers. Drop me an email if you want me to explain how I worked this out.
Matthew
                 Reply
Thanks for the maths, but I have one probability question. How many packs would I have to buy, on average, to obtain a fixed set of 20 stickers?
Milad
                 Reply
 Add a Comment 


I will only use your email address to reply to your comment (if a reply is needed).

Allowed HTML tags: <br> <a> <small> <b> <i> <s> <sup> <sub> <u> <spoiler> <ul> <ol> <li> <logo>
To prove you are not a spam bot, please type "r" then "a" then "t" then "i" then "o" in the box below (case sensitive):

Archive

Show me a random blog post
 2024 

Feb 2024

Zines, pt. 2

Jan 2024

Christmas (2023) is over
 2023 
▼ show ▼
 2022 
▼ show ▼
 2021 
▼ show ▼
 2020 
▼ show ▼
 2019 
▼ show ▼
 2018 
▼ show ▼
 2017 
▼ show ▼
 2016 
▼ show ▼
 2015 
▼ show ▼
 2014 
▼ show ▼
 2013 
▼ show ▼
 2012 
▼ show ▼

Tags

weather station stickers preconditioning polynomials python royal institution cambridge gather town european cup probability pi approximation day chess radio 4 errors quadrilaterals manchester logic sound mathsteroids binary sorting finite group folding tube maps fence posts approximation bempp puzzles accuracy runge's phenomenon london signorini conditions london underground wave scattering final fantasy realhats ternary crossnumber game of life sport light logo correlation data databet dinosaurs palindromes captain scarlet flexagons pascal's triangle national lottery guest posts manchester science festival inline code rugby triangles php pythagoras mathslogicbot hexapawn golden ratio dragon curves propositional calculus gaussian elimination tmip people maths a gamut of games frobel matrices misleading statistics hannah fry arithmetic dataset graphs martin gardner newcastle christmas card javascript books news nine men's morris bodmas countdown datasaurus dozen statistics mean recursion mathsjam crochet matrix multiplication asteroids gerry anderson stirling numbers harriss spiral menace rhombicuboctahedron matrix of cofactors bubble bobble the aperiodical fonts squares speed weak imposition interpolation talking maths in public fractals pi geogebra reddit simultaneous equations curvature exponential growth wool finite element method go programming pac-man ucl anscombe's quartet pizza cutting hyperbolic surfaces trigonometry football latex live stream edinburgh braiding big internet math-off draughts christmas games inverse matrices map projections royal baby chebyshev platonic solids sobolev spaces world cup craft data visualisation golden spiral plastic ratio phd zines oeis folding paper reuleaux polygons logs numerical analysis turtles standard deviation convergence matt parker advent calendar chalkdust magazine geometry youtube numbers machine learning estimation determinants game show probability dates matrix of minors noughts and crosses tennis raspberry pi 24 hour maths error bars hats computational complexity coins boundary element methods electromagnetic field graph theory cross stitch video games

Archive

Show me a random blog post
▼ show ▼
© Matthew Scroggs 2012–2024