There Are 177,147 Ways To Tie A Tie
Shar Pei Sadly, this dog can tie no knots. Beverly Lussier via wikimedia commons Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, a mathematician in Stockholm, recently led a small team on a quest to discern how many tie knots are possible. Their results, uploaded to arXiv, say there are 177,147 different ways to tie the knot of a necktie. That is 177,062 more ways than were found in 1999 by Cambridge mathematicians Yong Mao and Thomas Fink, who arrived at 85 possible ways to tie a tie. Why the discrepancy? Well, it comes down to what counts in tie tying. Take, for example, a conventional standard: the knot must be covered by the cloth of the tie. In the film "The Matrix: Reloaded," a character (the Merovingian) sports a tie where the knot is exposed, and where the big end of the tie goes...
