A rubber band is 1 meter long. An ant starts at one end, crawling at 1 millimeter per second. At the end of each second, the rubber band is instantaneously stretched by an additional meter. (So, at the end of the nth second, the rubber band becomes n+1 meters long.)

Does the ant ever reach the far end of the band? If so, when?

(In reply to re(4): The backward ant by Cheradenine)

I didn't mean to say that you can't use a computer in the process of figuring out the answer. Of course you can -- in fact, I used Excel to evaluate e^1000 (actually, log10(e^1000) = 1000/ln(10).)

What I meant to say is that you can't use a computer to directly compute the series. It's just too long.

Posted by Jim Lyon on 2002-10-08 05:51:13