Brain Game

Five thousand persons watched various outdoor sports at West Point last Saturday but no one watched a dozen cadets and 13 Harvardmen hunched in a West Point classroom, engaged in an abstruse brain contest. The teams were to solve ten out of eleven problems posed by President Arnold Dresden of the Mathematical Association of America. The size of the teams did not matter--the side which produced the ten best sets of answers would win. First day the teams worked over such easy matters as how many times two integral calculi go into four differential calculi. They quit early to have tea, rest their minds, study. Next day--a hot day --they moiled over discontinuous functions, convergent series, polar coordinates, second derivations. The finished papers were turned over to Professor Dresden at Swarthmore College. He was to announce results in ten days. Coaches for both teams agreed that fewer than four men on each side had been able to complete ten problems. They thought that one of the problems (the paper was not made public) could not be proved in mathematical terms.

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