THE MATHEMATICS OF SET, or EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT COMBINATORIAL GEOMETRY I LEARNED PLAYING CARDS -- Jordan Ellenberg, April 12, 2005

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The game of Set is a simple but addictive card game played with a special 
81-card deck. A standard "folklore question" among players of this game 
is: what is the largest number of cards that can be on the table which do 
not allow a legal play? I'll explain how this question, which seems to be 
about cards, is actually about geometry over a finite field,and I'll talk 
about what's known about this problem and related ones. If there's time, 
I'll try to convince you that this problem might have something to do with 
algebraic geometry_, and if there's even more time, I'll try to convince 
you that, no, in fact, it really has to do with Fourier analysis.