<p>Ok. I got this MATH problem from school that seems totally insane and insolvable. Has anyone ever done it before? Any ideas about anything? Help!</p>
<p>The Lonely Hunter:</p>
<p>A hunter leaves his house and walks 10 miles due south. Not finding anything, he turns and walks 10 miles due east where he spots a bear. He shoots the bear, and carries it 10 miles due north, where he arrives back at his house. What color was the bear?</p>
<p>(Yes, this is a real problem.)</p>
<p>White. The man is at the North Pole and the only bears there are polar bears.</p>
<p>Notice that the hunter never walks west to go back home.</p>
<p>What doesn’t make sense is that he carried the bear home. That’s quite a load.</p>
<p>This is some crazy s***. Whoa dude, i’m freaking out. like the 4th dimension or something. Crazy</p>
<p>I would bet on tanman’s answer. in real life, you wouldn’t ever get back to your house no matter the conditions. But, if you look at a globe, you WOULD end up back at our house.</p>
<p>One problem that people might have with this is that it involves curved space. Most places on earth don’t have to worry about this, but at the north pole, if you go south a distance x, make a ninty degree turn and go a distance x, then turn north ninty degrees and walk a distance x, you’re back where you started. In flat two dimensional (Euclidian) space, that process would have resulted in an open square and you’d still be a distance x away from your start position. In spherical space, an equilateral triangle has three right angles.</p>
<p>hey, thanks guys! it totally makes sense now! (I hope) :)</p>
<p>His his house is at the North pole.</p>
<p>how do we know his house is at the north pole?</p>
<p>its because he goes south first, you can’t go south at the south pole…</p>
<p>why can’t he be at a place other than the poles though?</p>
<p>Yeah, why can’t he? The earth is a sphere. Therefore, any point is just as good as any other.</p>
<p>Think about it.
<ol>
<li><p>Now suppose he starts at a spot 10 miles north of the equator, and does the same 10 south/ 10 east/ 10 north trip. (Try to visualize it on a 3-D globe). He now winds up slightly <em>less</em> than 10 miles east of his starting point, because of the earth’s curvature. You can calculate this distance exactly if you want to, if you know the earth’s radius.</p></li>
<li><p>If you follow this general trend i.e. starting further & further north of the equator, you will find that the distance between the starting & ending points keeps shrinking steadily. It shrinks to 0 when the starting point is the north pole.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>It only works at the north pole because the north, south, east, and west directions are defined relative to the north pole.</p>
<p>i got it now thanx was just a matter of taking out the old 3d globe to helping me visualize it</p>
<p>After I posted my initial answer, I googled the problem and found [this</a> page](<a href=“http://www.cincinnati.com/freetime/strange/080403_strange.html]this”>http://www.cincinnati.com/freetime/strange/080403_strange.html) with some other solutions (Question #2 on the linked page). The hunter could have started 1.16km from the the South pole, but that doesn’t answer the question because there aren’t any bears there.</p>