Winning IQ Tests

2007-04-30 by Thomas Fischer [en]

Ever made an IQ test? You may remember one of those questions where you are given a sequence of numbers and you have to add the next following number. There may be more valid answers than you may think.

An example for a given sequence might be 1, 1, 2, 3, 5. So, what's the next number? Some of you may have recognized the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence, in which case the next number would be 8.

But there are more valid answers. For example, you could answer 9. In this case your sequence represents the number of nodes in row n of the power tree or the maximal determinant of real n×n symmetric (0,1) matrices. Easy, isn't?

Keywords: Mathematics
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