Tangles, Fractions and Factors - Mark Hollingworth
29th June 2000
A tangle is a certain kind of arrangement of strings. Tangles were discovered in around 1955 by Prof. John H. Conway while he was still at school here in Liverpool. A tangle corresponds, in a simple way, to a fraction of some whole numbers. We will also see how to find a route to any given tangle, using the very interesting game of tangles in the first part of the activities and the Highest Common Factor in the second part (with a simple adaptation of the Euclidian algorithm).