December 13, 2016

Problem of the Week

Tuesday December 13, 2016

Congratulations to those students who found a way to create four triangles by connecting 6 match sticks end to end. The solution is the tetrahedron pictured below. In the 3 dimensional tetrahedron, four vertices or points are all connected directly to each other by a matchstick. If you wished to connect each of 5 points directly to every other point, how many matchsticks would you need? How many different triangles would you create? If you were to build a three-dimensional model, could all of the matchsticks be of the same length?

Winners of the five-point challenge