Capillary issues | THE GAME OF SCIENCE | EUROtoday

If our apprehensive princess final week falls 50 day by day hair and the account stays in 150,000, it implies that 50 new ones come out day by day. Logically, those that have simply left would be the final to fall, so the half -life of a hair is 150,000: 50 = 3,000 days. And because the hair grows 1 cm monthly, the princess’s hair will measure, at its level of most size, round 1 meter.

But my reader sagaces/is couldn’t cease observing that capillary actuality is considerably extra advanced, so the riddle raised quite a few and really fascinating feedback, particularly from a query raised by Salva Fuster: “Thinking again about the problem of the amethyst princess, which seems to me of the very good ones, I think of the following question: could it be concluded that the length of the hair is still Hair growth lasted longer? ” (And, by the way, a small metaproblema for initiates: how does SF know that the princess of the story is known as a amethyst?).

On the opposite hand, once we discuss concerning the size of a hair, can we confer with the size of the longest hair, to the common size of all hair …? Or, as says, Rafael Granero: “Paranoia leads me to see mice in the statements like a Dipsomaniac, sees cockroaches on the walls … arithmetic, I conclude that if the hair has 150,000 hair, distributed proportionally from the newborns to those about to fall, if the former measure almost nothing and the last almost one meter, then the hair measures 150,000 x 0.49 m ”. That is, about 75 km.

How many hair do you might have?

Unless you might be fully bald (or bald, that there are additionally), it isn’t doubtless that you understand how many hair there’s proper now in your head; But chances are you’ll suppose that it’s a very private endowment, and that it is rather unlikely that in your atmosphere there’s somebody who has precisely the identical variety of hair as you. And but …

Considering that the considerable hair of our princess represents a most that’s hardly overcome (it’s regular to have about 100,000 hair) and that Madrid has, in spherical numbers, about 3.5 million inhabitants, how many individuals are within the capital, no less than, with the identical variety of hair within the head? And at most?

A decade

I write this supply of THE GAME OF SCIENCE (No. 523) On June 12, 2025. And one other June 12, 2015, the primary installment appeared, entitled The Buddhist monk and the fastened level theorem. Our part (it isn’t mixtatic plural: I say it as a result of it’s one in every of my pleasant readers/is as a lot or greater than mine), then, ten years outdated, and began asking a query that appears extra theological than logical-mathematics: “Could God, in the prelude to the universal flood, whip the face of the earth with an ubiquitous wind?”. There I depart her once more.

And since in latest weeks we have now devoted some consideration to the entice questions, let’s finish with an associated to our anniversary: ​​what number of leap years can there be no less than and at most, in a decade?