Category: Math Puzzles
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Happy Valentine’s Day: Can You Maximize The Love On This Day?
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone, I hope you are having a euphoric moment, but if not, you can try this algebra puzzle about maximizing the expression LUV + LU + UV + LV given L + U + V = 12. What’s your favorite song about romance? Mine is A Thousand Years by Christina Perri. I…
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A Geometry Puzzle: What’s OC?
Honestly please share your approach to this one in the comments below because there are at least 7 different ways you can get to the correct answer. It’s also a good exercise in reviewing your trigonometry fundamentals. So dig in, my friend! And when you are done trying, keep reading for the solution. Solution Because…
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What Day Of The Week Is It?
As a kid, I used to hear stories of child prodigies being able to figure out what day of the week it is say 1000 days from today. In fact, what is it? Apart from that, let’s try and tackle today’s puzzle about the day of the week of the 100th day of the year…
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A Cambridge University Admission Question
This is question 4 from the Test of Mathematics for University Admission practice paper by the University of Cambridge. The sequence does look a bit scary at first glance, but fret not, writing out the first few terms will help you find the summation from n = 1 to 39. Now I did this in…
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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…