Category: Math Puzzles
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Will Homer Simpson Get His Own Seat?
A line of 100 airline passengers is waiting to board a plane. They each hold a ticket to one of the 100 seats on that flight. For convenience, let’s say that the nthnth passenger in line has a ticket for seat number ‘n’. Being drunk, the first person in line picks a random seat (equally likely for…
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Can You Outsmart Jane Street’s Tic Tac Toe Bot?
I found this nice brain teaser from Jane Street’s Puzzles, it’s about you playing against an imperfect computer program in a game of tic tac toe. You’re going to play Tic Tac Toe against a computer program, and you get to go first. The program is not very smart, and its strategy, which you are…
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Can You Find All Possible Solutions In Both Cases?
Apparently a version of this puzzle appeared in ‘Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques’. So we want to arrange the nine digits so that the first two numbers will multiply together to make the third. In our examples above, we have 12 × 483 = 5,796 and 4 × 1,738 = 6,952. Now can you find all…
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Can You Find The Number Below 400? This question took me less than a minute!
This math puzzle is about a pyramid made up of consecutive integers starting from 1. So on the first row, we have 1. On the second row, we have 2, 3 and 4. There are two more numbers in every subsequent row. And our goal is to find the number directly below the number 400.…
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Can You Solve This Oxford University Math Challenge?
This algebra challenge comes from the 1997 Oxford University’s Entrance Exam. And to be honest, any student with a good understanding of the A-level curriculum should be able to work this out. Specifically we want to find which power of x has the greatest coefficient in the expansion of polynomial shown above. Now grab your…
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An Oxford MAT Question from 1997
This is honestly one of the best puzzles for students and anyone looking to test their understanding of calculus. It took me a while to be able to do it in my head, and I think there are two layers of understanding to the solution. So give this problem a go, and when you are…
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So What’s The Most Number of Hats You Can Make?
You are making clown hats from a circular piece of cardboard. The circumference of the base of each hat equals its slant height,which in turn is equal to the radius of the piece of cardboard. What is the maximum number of hats that you can make fromthe piece of cardboard? As usual, I encourage to…
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Which One Is The Smallest?
In school, we learn that a surd is an expression containing an irrational root, such as √11, √2, √5. They are used to irrational numbers exactly without rounding. And no irrational numbers are not unreasonable, they are simply numbers that can not be expressed as a ratio between two integers p and q in the…
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Can You Find The Total Length Of The Border Of The Cyan Design?
The shaded figure is formed by eight circular arcs of equal radius. Four arcs are centered at the vertices of a square, and the other four at the midpoints of its sides. The diagonals of the square have length 1. Find the total length of the boundary of the shaded figure. As usual, I encourage…