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Can our coinage system be improved?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Peter Shiu*
Affiliation:
353 Fulwood Road, Sheffield S10 3BQ e-mail: p.shiu@yahoo.co.uk

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Some forty years ago my wife Christine and I considered the problems in this article, which involves a fair amount of computation. Computing facilities were not good then, so we considered instead the problems in [1] in which we showed, without using computers, that there were 64703 ways to make up £1 using coins; this was before the introduction of the 20p and £1 coins, and the ½p coin was in circulation. If Christine were still with us, this would have been another piece of joint work. I therefore dedicate this article to her memory.

The design of a coinage system depends on considerations we give to various criteria: for example, the number of denominations for the coins, the maximum number of coins required to deliver any given amount in a range, or the required number of coins averaged over the range; see also §3.

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Copyright © Mathematical Association 2018