A Note on Sources

Here’s how I’ve handled sources and citations (Rudd writing): As I accumulated problems from various sources over the years, I wrote them on filing cards and was sloppy about keeping track of where I found them. Some problems are simply generic, like the basic recipes in a cookbook. But many, especially the kind I’ve liked to collect, deserve citation. So now, in setting up this website, I have searched back and found sources for as many such problems as I could.

In going through the problem collection, I grouped the problems as follows:

Problems needing a footnote:

• Problems taken word for word, or a copied diagram exactly; source given accurately. There are about 150 of these.

• Problems taken word for word, or a copied diagram exactly; source not found (groan). There are 32 or so of these, alas. These are the ones I'm unhappy about.

• Problems with a cool idea, that my crew has rewritten for local/timely/fun reasons; good spirit to credit the source but not legally required, I'm sure.

Problems that I think don’t need a footnote:

• Problems with a cool idea that have appeared in many sources.

• Problems from old AHSME’s.

• Problems that are just straight math things – no particular flavor; no need to cite (anybody could have thought them up; maybe Stella or I did).

Perhaps the most-used single source is the massive collection of problems given out at "a conference on computers in secondary-school mathematics, June 22-27, 1986", at Phillips Exeter Academy. There is a tremendous number of interesting problems in this collection. There is no copyright for the entire document, and there is no citation for any problem. Thus I don't think we're required to cite these problems, but the Exeter folks certainly deserve a shout-out for creating/compiling them.