AsianScientist (Apr. 22, 2015) – “So, boys,” said Cheryl, stretching out contentedly on the sofa and surveying the aftermath of a very successful birthday party. “How do you like being famous?”
Albert and Bernard exchanged nervous glances. They never knew how to react around their only female friend—they weren’t even sure why she kept them around in the first place. Was there a right answer to this question?
“Well,” ventured Albert, brushing stray confetti off his shirt. “People keep asking me to guess their birthdays. It’s gotten a little annoying.”
“I forgot my mum’s last week,” admitted Bernard sheepishly.
“Mmm,” mused Cheryl disinterestedly, nudging the dog, who belched politely and rolled over in his sleep. Those damned party guests, she thought. Feeding him champagne again.
“You know, this isn’t the first time a woman has stumped the world with a math puzzle.”
“Oh?” said the boys warily.
“No. Have you heard of the Monty Hall problem?”
“Oh, yes!” said Bernard proudly, as Albert sulked. “It’s based on the game show Let’s Make a Deal, and named after its host.”
“Imagine you’re on a TV game show, and you’re given a choice of three doors,” continued Bernard, buoyed along by one of Cheryl’s specialty saccharine smiles. “Behind one of them is a car, but behind the other two are goats. Pick the right door, and the car is yours. You choose Door 1, say. The host, who knows what is behind the doors, opens another door, let’s say Door 3, and reveals a goat. He then gives you a choice—do you want to stick with Door 1, or switch to Door 2 instead?”
“The reason this problem is so well known,” interrupted Cheryl, “is a woman named Marilyn vos Savant.”
She rolled her eyes at their gaping mouths. “vos Savant—great name isn’t it—was an American child prodigy who once held the record for the world’s highest IQ. She writes a long-running column called ‘Ask Marilyn’ for Parade Magazine, in which she answers math and logic puzzles sent in by readers. In 1990, someone sent in the Monty Hall.”
“The problem wasn’t new. It had made its first appearance in a statistics journal in 1975, and had been discussed several times since then in academic publications. But it was still relatively unknown—until Ask Marilyn took it on, that is.”
“In her column, vos Savant wrote that yes, you should switch, because there is a 1/3 chance that the car is behind the first door, but a 2/3 chance that it is behind the second. Her answer was correct—”
“Wait, what?” sputtered Albert.
“—but it was so counter-intuitive that, in the months that followed, she received more than 10,000 letters, the vast majority insisting that she was wrong,” continued Cheryl, silencing Albert with a withering stare.
“Some comments were overtly sexist. ‘Maybe women look at math problems differently than men,’ went one. ‘There is such a thing as female logic,’ went another. One person, bizarrely enough, called her a goat.”
“Academics, too, were outraged—she was inundated with vitriolic letters from mathematicians and scientists taking her to task for misinforming the public.”
“In the face of this outcry, vos Savant spent her next three columns explaining her reasoning—with grace and good humor too, I might add. She didn’t stop there—to put her answer to the test, she called on teachers across the US to play the game with their students, and the results of these classroom probability trials completely supported her thinking. After months of controversy, the tide of public opinion turned in her favor, and many of her critics eventually wrote back to admit that they had been wrong.”
“What a great example of staying calm, sticking to your guns, and trusting in your own abilities. Marilyn, you go girl—you went viral in the 1990s!”
“And that,” concluded Cheryl, “is why even Bernard here has heard of Monty Hall.”
Bernard, who had at that moment been preoccupied with the question of whether there was any cake left, snapped back to attention. Albert smirked.
“Hey, maybe we can invite Marilyn to next year’s party,” said Cheryl brightly, as the boys turned pale. “Make it game show-themed or something…”
#Cherylsbirthday
After Singaporean TV presenter Kenneth Kong posted #Cherylsbirthday to his Facebook feed on April 11, the brain-cramping logic puzzle quickly went viral. In it, Cheryl reveals her birthday to her new friends Albert and Bernard (and to puzzle solvers) through a list of ten possible dates and several cryptic clues.
The teaser stumped people all over the world, trended on social media, and was picked up by dozens of international news sources. Cheryl, Albert, and Bernard even got their own cartoon in The New Yorker, which probably echoed the popular sentiment when it called Cheryl a “manipulative little psychopath.”
Originally thought to be for 11-year-old Singaporean students (which might partly have explained its fame), #Cherylsbirthday was in fact a Math Olympiad competition question targeted at talented 14-year-olds. It was adapted for this purpose by Dr. Joseph Yeo, a lecturer at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, but its original source is unknown.
This article is from a monthly column called The Bug Report. Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Harsha K R/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
