JamulBlog

U.S. geography puzzle: find two points inside the United States such that (1) both points are in the same state, and (2) the straight line segment (shortest great circle) connecting them crosses the largest number of distinct states.

It turns out that there are quite a few such lines that traverse four states (like the Missouri example at right), but only two that traverse five (and one of them uses Washington D.C. as a “state”).  Using the programming language “R”, a programmer going by “ATodd” automated the search, and then wrote an interesting article describing how he did it...