Round Trip

A man eats breakfast at his camp, then travels due south. After going 10 miles in a straight line he stops for lunch. Then he sets out again due south. After going 10 miles in a straight line he finds himself back at camp. Where is he?

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“Grammatical Puzzle”

Let the rich, great, and noble banquet in the festal halls,
And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;
Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy walls
Proclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.

“Take away one letter from a word in the above stanza, and substitute another, leaving the word so metamorphosed still a word of the English language; and, by that change, totally alter the syntactical construction of the whole sentence, changing the moods and tenses of verbs, turning verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and adjectives into adverbs, &c., and so make the entire stanza bear quite a different meaning from that which it has as it stands above.”

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Varying Reports

Which statements on this list are true?

  1. Exactly one statement on this list is false.
  2. Exactly two statements on this list are false.
  3. Exactly three statements on this list are false.
  4. Exactly four statements on this list are false.
  5. Exactly five statements on this list are false.
  6. Exactly six statements on this list are false.
  7. Exactly seven statements on this list are false.
  8. Exactly eight statements on this list are false.
  9. Exactly nine statements on this list are false.
  10. Exactly ten statements on this list are false.
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Strange Math

Two problems that will make you want to throw a chair at someone, from John Jackson, Rational Amusements for Winter Evenings, 1821:

I.

If from six ye take nine, and from nine ye take ten
(Ye youths, now the mystery explain;)
And if fifty from forty be taken, there then,
Shall just half a dozen remain.

II.

One third of twelve, if you divide,
By just one fifth of seven,
The true result (it has been tried,)
Exactly is eleven.

How? Why?

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Lightning Addition

A (probably apocryphal) story tells that, as a 10-year-old schoolboy, Carl Friedrich Gauss was asked to find the sum of the first 100 integers. The tyrannical schoolmaster, who had intended this task to occupy the boy for some time, was astonished when Gauss presented the correct answer, 5050, almost immediately.

How did Gauss find it?

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There Goes the Neighborhood

A Martian sand lizard can reproduce itself in a single day. Start with a single sand lizard and on succeeding days you’ll have 2, then 4, and so on. In 30 days you’ll have 536,870,912 lizards.

How long would it take to reach that number if you started with two lizards?

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Steadfast

steadfast chess problem

By W. Bone. White to move and mate in four.

The catch: He must mate with the queen — and she’s glued to the board.

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Measuring the River

measuring the river

A traveler reaches a river at the point A and wishes to know the width across to B. As he has no means of crossing the river, what is the easiest way of finding its width?

From Henry Dudeney.

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