In my puzzle blog earlier today I set you the following three challenges: 1) The King of the Mountains went up the col at 15 km an hour and down it at 45 km an hour. It took him two hours in total. Assuming that the distance he travelled up and down are the same,…
Bonjour guzzleurs, As we are almost midway through the Tour de France, I thought it would be a good moment for some bicycle puzzles. 1) The King of the Mountains went up the col at 15 km an hour and down it at 45 km an hour. It took him two hours in total. Assuming…
My friend Richard Maunder, who has died aged 80, was distinguished in two separate scholarly disciplines: mathematics and musicology. His book, Algebraic Topology, first published in 1970, became a well-established textbook, and when his interests turned more fully to music he created a new version of Mozart’s Requiem that was controversial but led scholars and…
Hi guzzlers We use numbers every day to describe the world – distances, weights, speeds, debts, populations, and so on. Yet most of us struggle to have an intuitive sense of what these numbers mean. How big is big? How fast is fast? Today I’ve set a different challenge to my usual mathematical puzzle. The…
The tricky math behind your bus route. Credit: Monkey Business Images/shutterstock.com Have you ever waited for your bus at a bus stop for a very long time – only to be greeted by two or more buses arriving together? This phenomenon, known as “bus bunching,” is a problem that bus transit systems around the world…
Phase trajectories for a social system in a conflict situation without external interference. Credit: Lobachevsky University A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Alexander Petukhov of the Institute of International Relations and World History at Lobachevsky University is developing social conflict models on the basis of nonlinear dynamics. For mathematical modeling, an important feature…
“Simon Jenkins (The cult of tests is ruining our schools, 15 June) doesn’t mention the most recent proposals from the Department for Education, to introduce “baseline tests” when children enter primary school reception classes. The stated purpose of these tests is to provide measures of “progress” between reception and year 6 when children take the…
Earlier today I set you a puzzle about a mirror: A man is facing a mirror hanging on a wall 1m in front of him. In order for him to see himself entirely in the mirror, what is the minimum possible height of the mirror and where should it be mounted on the wall? He…
Hi guzzlers Here’s a puzzle about something we do every day: gaze at ourselves in the mirror. Who says maths is not relevant to the real world? In fact, You may have often pondered this question without realising it when trying on clothes. A man is facing a mirror hanging on a wall 1m in…
I used to long to be a child again. Not any more. British children seem under perpetual assault from the three horsemen of the apocalypse: obesity, social media and the manic gods of examination. Of these the most needless, and clearly dangerous, is the exam. The signs of stress are blatant. One in 10 schoolchildren…