We Used New York City’s 47 Bridges To Solve An 18th Century Math Puzzle by Andy Kiersz.
From the post:
The George Washington Bridge isn’t the only way to get from one landmass to another in New York City.
NYC is built on an archipelago, and consequently has a ton of bridges. There are 47 non-rail-only bridges in New York City that appear on Wikipedia’s list of said bridges.
In this exercise, we answer: Is it possible to get around NYC by crossing every bridge just once?
This is more than just a fun math puzzle. The process for answering this question eventually led to modern-day, real-world applications that couldn’t have been imagined when a similar question was first posed nearly 300 years ago.
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A highly entertaining examination of how to solve the Seven Bridges of Koenigsburg for the “47ish Bridges of NYC.”
Profusely illustrated with maps to help you follow the narration.
Good introductory material on graphs.
Would need supplementing to strengthen the cases for graphs being important. For example, “relationships between people on social networking sites” can be modeled as a graph, doesn’t really capture the imagination.
Whereas, your relationships to other people in high school, college, work and on social network sites can be represented in a graph, might provoke a more visceral reaction.