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In the sci.math newsgroup ca. 23 Mar 2013, in thread Subject: Re: math formulae?, I saw the following:

> >"Is the tournment liken to a bridge tournment? The problem is vague.
> > As there are 100 diffenent bigender pairs, 10 rounds would be
> > inadequate.

> I can’t compare euchre to bridge, as I don’t know how the latter is
> played. In this particular euchre tournament, there are to be 5 tables,
> each seating 2 bigender pairs per round ...

Anyway, does anyone know what a big-ender pair is? Also, it seems to me to be incorrect to leave out the hyphen as those newsgroup posters did. For example, the wikipedia article on Endianness consistently hyphenates big-endian, little-endian, etc.

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I found the rest of the conversation you refer to on mathforum.org. Based on the entire transcript, I think it is clear they are using bigender to mean pairs composed of one man and one woman, bi-gender as suggested by St John of the Cross (emphasis mine):

I've been assigned a task which requires a level of mathematical/ computational skill which I do not have.

There are 20 players - 10 men and 10 women - participating in a euchre tournament of 10 rounds at 5 tables. The objective is to have each man partner with each woman once and play against each woman once, to have the women all play against each other least once, to have the men all play against each other least once, and to seat each player twice at all 5 tables.


Is the tournment liken to a bridge tournment? The problem is vague. As there are 100 diffenent bigender pairs, 10 rounds would be inadequate.

Whether or not bigender is used correctly here is another issue.

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  • In that case it should definitely be bi-gender.
    – Mynamite
    Apr 2, 2013 at 2:39

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