With summer underway, it’s not always easy to stay sharp.
Martin Gardener’s weird math puzzles may be math puzzles, but once you get into them they stick in your head like a catchy song until you find a way to weave your way through its labyrinth.
Mathematician and pop science writer Martin Gardener wrote a math puzzle column for Scientific American for 25 years. Last fall he would have been 100 and Scientific American, along with many other publications, published tributes to him that featured many of his puzzles.
The Guardian posted a number of their favorite puzzles, including this one:
With one straight cut you can slice a pie into two pieces. A second cut that crosses the first one will produce four pieces, and a third cut can produce as many as seven pieces. What is the largest number of pieces that you can get with six straight cuts?
Head over to The Guardian to get the solution and find a few a more brain teasers.
Get started on these puzzles, then check out 5 STEM summer camps and 9 STEM activities to do at home in the summer.
Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons
[…] Researchers Casey Mann, Jennifer McLoud-Mann, and David Von Derau used a computer algorithm to automatically search through sets of possible outcomes. Since the number of convex pentagons is infinite, coming up with new combinations is a more difficult endeavor than it might originally seem. It took the three mathematicians two years to arrive at a new solution to the nearly century-old puzzle. […]