# The Flying Colours Maths Blog: Latest posts

## Ask Uncle Colin: A round-robin

Dear Uncle Colin I’m organising a tournament with 16 teams, and wanted to arrange it in five stages, each consisting of four groups of four teams. However, I found that after three rounds, it wasn’t possible to find any groups without making teams play each other again! Why is that?

## Heads, Tails and Bumpsdaisy, revisited

At a recent East Dorset Mathsjam , the puzzle of two heads resurfaced: if you repeatedly flip a fair coin, how long (on average) do you have to wait until you get two heads in a row? Two fine answers are available here. However, the estimable Barney Maunder-Taylor went down

Dear Uncle Colin, I have to solve $5^x = 6 - 5^{1-x}$ - I understand it’s going to end up as a quadratic, but I can’t see how! - Explain, Uncle Colin, Like I Demand! Hi, EUCLID and thanks for your message! The key thing here is to spot that

## The Dictionary of Mathematical Eponymy: Daubechies Wavelets

Before I dive in to Daubechies wavelets, a confession: at university, Fourier series were the bane of my existence. I could do them, under duress, but in the same way as I set up the audio for Wrong, But Useful1: I had a recipe of steps I needed to follow,

## Ask Uncle Colin: Traffic Flow

Dear Uncle Colin, I read that when cars are driving at 70mph on the motorway, they take up more space than when they travel more slowly (because you need to leave a longer safe gap between them). What’s the most efficient speed for motorway travel if you want to get

## Ask Uncle Colin: Are these fractions equivalent?

Dear Uncle Colin, How can I tell whether $\frac{221}{391}$ and $\frac{403}{713}$ are equivalent? - Calculator Answer Not Considered Enough, LOL Hi, CANCEL, and thanks for your message! There’s a naive way to do it and a clever way. Let’s do it naively The naive way is to see whether \$\frac{221}{391}