One of my favorite activities at the Exploratorium in San Francisco was shifting blocks to achieve maximum overhang.  The result was mathematically beautiful.  It’s interesting to see that the problem has been tackled again more recently & the solution makes use of random walks.

As the author of the maximum overhang paper notes, “Once one finds the classical solution, related to the harmonic series, it seems so beautiful and satisfying. It seems counterintuitive that one could do much better—that’s one source of fascination.” 

(via Maximum overhang, optimum reward)