What's annoying me about the second question is the distinction I'm thinking about what constitutes a handshake:
are we determining that the number of hand shakes
- grasping of the hands between two people constitutes a handshake; or
- the number of times one moves their hands up and down is the hand shake
so I'm thinking the former, but still finding it difficult to see how the number of handshakes can ever be odd.
You need at least two people, the sum of their hand shakes is even, you add a third, and everyone shakes hands at least once, so the sum of all their handshakes is even.
I'm not sure the rest of the solution can involve any odd numbers.
i have a mental hurdle -- i'm not thinking about it in the right way
If there's only two teachers at the convention and they shake hands, that's just one handshake- an odd number. The count is an "objective" count of all handshake-events, not the sum of everyone's personal handshake counts.
Writing unambiguous math problems is a surprisingly hard thing to do!
are we determining that the number of hand shakes
- grasping of the hands between two people constitutes a handshake; or
- the number of times one moves their hands up and down is the hand shake
so I'm thinking the former, but still finding it difficult to see how the number of handshakes can ever be odd.
You need at least two people, the sum of their hand shakes is even, you add a third, and everyone shakes hands at least once, so the sum of all their handshakes is even.
I'm not sure the rest of the solution can involve any odd numbers.
i have a mental hurdle -- i'm not thinking about it in the right way