Difficulty: Advanced

A regular hexagon is split into small equilateral triangles and then the triangles are paired arbitrarily into rhombuses. Show that this results into three types of rhombuses based on orientation, with equal number of rhombuses from each type.

Color the rhombuses based on their type and imagine the diagram represents a structure of small cubes arranged in a larger cube. If you look at the large cube from three different angles, you will see exactly the three types of rhombuses on the diagram.

Alternatively, the problem can be proven more rigorously by considering the three sets of non-intersecting broken lines connecting the pairs of opposite sides of the hexagon, as shown on the image below. The type of each rhombus is determined by the types of the broken lines passing through it. Therefore, there are n² rhombuses of each type, where n is the length of the hexagon’s sides.

Is it true that for every closed curve in the plane, you can use a rope to recreate the layout, so that the rope can be untangled?
Said otherwise, you have to determine at each intersection point of the closed curve, which of the two parts goes over and which one goes under, so that there aren’t any knots in the resulting rope.

Start from any point of the curve and keep moving along it, so that at each non-visited intersection you go over, until you get back to where you started from.

David Justice and Derek Jeter were professional baseball players. In 1997 they had the following conversation:

David: Did you know that in both 1995 and 1996 I had better batting averages than you?

Derek: No way, my batting average over the last two years was definitely higher than yours!

It turned out that both of them were right. How is it possible?

This is the so called Simpson’s paradox. The reason it occurred is that during 1996 both players had high averages and Derek Jeter had many more hits than David Justice. In 1996 both players had low averages and David Justice had many more hits than Derek Jeter. You can see their official statistics below.