It has been a pure delight to melt your brains every week, but today’s solution will be the last installment of the Gizmodo Monday Puzzle. Thank you to everyone who commented, emailed, or puzzled along in silence. Since I can’t leave you hanging with nothing to solve, check out some puzzles I made recently for the…
Before you accuse me of clickbait, hear me out. If you scroll the same corners of social media that I do, then you’re sick of seeing meme puzzle accounts abuse the caption “Only 1% of people can solve!” over some lightweight teasers. Are we really supposed to believe that only 1 in 100 people can count the triangles…
This Thursday is Pi Day, the one day of the year devoted to a mathematical constant (it also happens to be Einstein’s birthday). We all learned as kids about how special pi is and have since accepted its cultural status as a geeky totem and a number worth celebrating. But perhaps we should revisit pi through the jaded…
In 2023, I posed 23 challenges as part of the Gizmodo Monday Puzzle series. Some require a bit of math, and others a light familiarity with physics; but most can be solved through logic and creative thinking. For each of the following puzzles, I provide a link to the solution, but I suggest you resist the temptation…
We all keep secrets. It’s easy to do once you’ve committed to it. Just don’t say anything. But it can be harder when you want to share a little bit of information, without your confidante inferring tea that you didn’t intend to spill. Computer scientists often draw this distinction between security and privacy.…
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…
