# Browsing category puzzles

One of the many lovely things about Big MathsJam is that I’ve found My People - I’ve made several very dear friends there, introduced others to the circle, and get to stay in touch with other maths fans through the year. It’s golden. Adam Atkinson is one of those dear

## Cards and lattices

“That looks straightforward,” I thought. “I’ll keep on looking at this geometry puzzle.” Nut-uh. A standard pack of 52 cards is shuffled. The cards are turned over one at a time, and you guess whether each will be red or black. How many correct guesses do you expect to make?

## A triangle puzzle

Like everyone else on Twitter, I’m a sucker for a nice-looking question, and @cshearer41 is a reliable source of such things. I particularly liked this one: There are two equilateral triangles inside this semicircle. What’s the area of the larger one? pic.twitter.com/Nvy01z2j5f — Catriona Shearer (@Cshearer41) November 7, 2018 Straight

## A Puzzle From The MathsJam Shout (With Generating Functions)

In a recent MathsJam Shout, courtesy of Bristol MathsJam, we were given a situation, which I paraphrase: Cards bearing the letters A to E are shuffled and placed face-down on the table. You predict which of the cards bears which letter (You make all of your guesses before anything is

## On Epiphanies

I had a fascinating conversation on Twitter the other day about, I suppose, different modes of solving a problem. Here’s where it started: Heh. You spend half an hour knee-deep in STEP algebra, solve it, then realise that tweaking the diagram a tiny bit turns it into a two-liner. —

## A tasty puzzle

Normally when I call something a tasty puzzle, it's a lame local-paper pun about it being to do with cakes or something. In this case, it's not even that. Sorry to disappoint. Instead, it's a puzzle that came to me via reddit: Find $\sum_{i=1}^{10} \frac{2}{4^{\frac{i}{11}}+2}$. Eleventh roots? That's likely to

## Mathematical Dingbats

When I was growing up, we had a game called Dingbats - it would offer a sort of graphical cryptic clue to a phrase and you'd have to figure out what the phrase was. For example: West Ham 4-1 Leicester City Chelsea 4-1 Man Utd Liverpool 4-1 Man City Everton

## Doubling

An excellent puzzle I heard from @panlepan (I paraphrase, as I've lost the tweet): When you move the final digit of 142857 to the front, you get 714285, which is five times as large. What is the smallest positive integer that is doubled when the last digit moves to the

## Two coins, one fair, one biased

When the redoubtable @cuttheknotmath (Alexander Bogomolny) poses the following question: Two Coins: One Fair, one Biased https://t.co/Rz2zR3LRDj #FigureThat #math #probability pic.twitter.com/HHhnyGjhkq — Alexander Bogomolny (@CutTheKnotMath) March 5, 2018 ... you know there must be Something Up. Surely (the naive reader thinks) the one with two heads out of three is

## A calculator puzzle

"Your calculator has broken, leaving you with only the buttons for $\sin$, $\cos$, $\tan$ and their inverses, the equals button and the 0 that starts on the screen. Show that you can still produce any positive rational number." When this showed up on Reddit, I knew I was in for