How many ways are there to tie your shoes?
Depends on the shoes, but Ian has done some calculations (under certain assumptions) to show there are over 2 trillion ways!
Mathematician, Burkard Polster, published an article in the journal Nature (December 2002) about the mathematics of shoe lacing. His calculation for the number of ‘real-world’ lacing methods (of a shoe with 12 eyelets) is 43,200. He also has a shoe lace book that is published by the AMS.
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