This week’s puzzle is difficult. Not because it has an exceedingly complicated solution, but because the idea that underlies it is deep and ingenious. I only know of one method to solve it, but I’m curious whether alternative approaches exist. Feel free to spitball half-baked ideas in the comments. You might find…
Every few months, a math problem goes viral on social media. Disappointingly often, it lacks mathematical meat. It seems over half of them boil down to the order of operations. Some tweet will get thousands of likes claiming that the Internet is divided over an arithmetic problem like: what does 6÷2(1+2) equal? It’s…
Here’s a mind-blowing geography fact: The northernmost part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southernmost part of Brazil. Facts like this partly speak to truly unusual geographical features of Earth (like Brazil’s massive land area) but also to how warped our perception can be of our own home. We’ve…
