The eight queens
Personatges:
Tema: Strategies for deducing reasonable conclusions from a mathematical model.
Competències
Competència en Comunicació Lingüística
Competència Matemàtica, en ciència, tecnologia i enginyeria
Competència personal, social i aprendre a aprendre
Competència en consciència i expressions culturals
Matèries i cursos per Sistema Educatiu
Espanya > Matemàtiques > 3r ESO > Sentit algebraic
Espanya > Matemàtiques > 3r ESO > Sentit socioafectiu
Espanya > Matemàtiques > 4t(A) ESO > Sentit algebraic
Espanya > Matemàtiques > 4t(A) ESO > Sentit socioafectiu
Enunciat
Julia Bowman (1919-1985) was a prestigious mathematician from the United States. She was the first female member of the Mathematics Division of the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the first female president of the American Mathematical Society.
She dedicated part of her scientific work to game theory, which is a branch of mathematics with applications in very different disciplines (sociology, psychology, economics, business management, military strategy, biology, artificial intelligence, etc.) that analyses the interactions between individuals who make decisions. In fact, Julia managed to prove a convergence theorem that is considered the most important one in Elementary Game Theory.
The following puzzle is proposed: The eight queens.
In a chess board, the queen is able move any number of squares either horizontally, vertically or diagonally.
You must place eight queens on the board so that none of them can attack another.
It might be useful to start solving this puzzle by placing four queens in a 4x4 board, so that there are not two queens in the same row, and then add more rows. Practice to find a winning strategy. Is there only one possible solution?
Observacions i context
Julia Bowman had a difficult childhood. Her mother died when she was 2 years old. At the age of 10 she contracted rheumatic fever, that forced her to spend a year isolated from others, missing two years of schooling; and her father committed suicide after losing all their savings as a result of the Great Depression, when she was 18 years old.
Despite missing two years of schooling, when she returned to school, she studied mathematics and physics, being the only woman to attend these classes. She graduated in 1936 with honours in science and was awarded the Bausch-Lomb Honorary Medal for excellent results in mathematics and science.
She had great family support, in particular from her sister Constance and her adoptive mother, Edenia, who always encouraged her to continue her studies.
Julia Bowman and her older sister Constance remained close, and both contributed to the history of mathematics. Constance was a journalist and she was a well-known science biographer —particularly of her sister [Julia: A Life in Mathematics, Mathematical Association of America, 1996]– and mathematics communicator.
Her husband, Raphael Mitchel Robinson, established the Julia Bowman Robinson Scholarship Fund for graduate students in mathematics in Berkeley in 1986.
Julia Bowman's predecessors are Theano of Crotone (6th century BC) mathematician and philosopher; Hypatia of Alexandria (360-415), mathematician and philosopher; Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646-1684), mathematician and philosopher; Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), mathematician, physicist and philosopher; Laura Maria Catharina Bassi (1711-1778), scientist, poetess and philosopher; Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799), mathematician, linguist and philosopher; Sophie Germain (1776-1831), mathematician; and Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934), physicist, mathematician and chemist.
Her contemporaries were the mathematicians Jacqueline Ferrand (1918-2014), Katherine Johnson (1918-2020), Paulette Libermann (1919-2007), Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya (1920-2012) and Kateryna Yushchenko (1919-2001), mathematician and computer scientist.
Other important female scientists of the early 20th century are Barbara McClintock (1902-1992), biologist; Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), chemist; Inge Lehmann (1888-1993), geologist and seismologist; Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), chemist; Mary Leakey (1913-1996), anthropologist; Marie Tharp (1920-2006), geologist and cartographer; Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000), inventor; and Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), computer scientist and servicewoman, among others.
Descripció
The eight queens problem is a classic logic and strategy exercise using a chess board with eight queens. These pieces must be placed on the board so they cannot attack each other. It has a mathematical structure and can be framed within Game Theory.