Robert K. Moniot

Research Areas

Scale-space and equation-error minimization approaches to problems in image
reconstruction and solution of partial differential equations.

Least-squares fitting data with experimental uncertainties in all
coordinates.

Fit to a hyperplane having only one dependent coordinate and any number of independent coordinates.
This work was done when I was a graduate student many years ago. It
was never published except as a tech report. Here is that tech
report in
PDF format,HTML format, or the original
LaTeX document.

Norman Perlmutter, then a student
at Grinnell College and now at
City
University of New York, has answered one of the open questions
in the paper: a winning strategy for the game does exist, at least
asymptotically (i.e., for pot sizes larger than some as-yet
undetermined value). He has submitted a paper on this topic to the
Pi Mu
Epsilon Journal.

After the Math Horizons paper appeared, I learned that the game was invented by
Diane Resek of San Francisco
State University. She writes:
I came up with the game when I was working at the Lawrence Hall of
Science in Berkeley from about 1969 to 1972. I was coordinating a
grant Leon Henkin (UC Berkeley) and Robert Davis (I think he was at U
of Illinois at that time) had from NSF to work with K-6 teachers in
the Berkeley Unified School District. One of the things I tried to do
was to come up with interesting ways for kids to practice their skills
or their facts which would involve them in some thinking and not be so
boring. The Taxman was one game I came up with for multiplication
facts. It was named for the Beatle's song -"Taxman". At the same
time other people were working with kids on teletype machines. They
taught them Basic and had games on it for them to play. When I came
up with a game or an activity, they would turn it into a program.
(slightly edited).