In a position puzzle, a phrase is meant to be inferred from the position of words on a page. A familiar example is
stand take to takings. I you throw my
This can be read “I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertakings.”
“Sometimes the difficulty is increased by using letters and making them suggest words,” noted Household Words in 1882. It offered this example, adding, “This requires some little thought”:
What does it say?
Why didn’t this catch on? Jean Gronier’s “automatic hair-cutting machine,” patented in 1966, works “in accordance with a predetermined program; each program is designed for a particular person and is established once and for all with a view to obtaining repeatedly the same cut for the same head.”
“Here I am, bald at last,” wrote Jules Renard in 1894. “So much the better! What use to me was hair? It was not exactly an ornament, and I was the natural victim of all barbers, an ignoble breed, who exhaled into my face their disdain, or caressed me like a mistress, or patted my cheek like a parish priest.”
The following was rather widely quoted a few years ago. It bothered one banker so much that he made a hasty trip to consult his neighbor, a college professor of mathematics. Assume we make a deposit of $50 in a bank.
withdraw $20.00 leaving $30.00 now withdraw 15.00 leaving 15.00 now withdraw 9.00 leaving 6.00 now withdraw 6.00 leaving 0.00 ------ ------ $50.00 $51.00We now present our figures to the bank, showing the discrepancy, and demand the extra dollar. Repeat ten thousand times, and retire for a while.
— Cecil B. Read, “Mathematical Fallacies,” School Science and Mathematics, June 1933
In 1589, German farmer Peter Stumpp confessed that the devil had given him a belt that would give him “the likeness of a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like fire, a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth, a huge body, and mighty paws.”
Over the course of 25 years, he said, he had killed and eaten 14 children, two pregnant women, and their fetuses.
The confession was extracted on the rack, but the magistrate didn’t care: Stumpp was broken, hobbled, beheaded, and burned.
(The Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter, a Most Wicked Sorcerer, 1590.)
Here are three cups, one upside down.
Turning over exactly two cups with each move, can you turn all cups right-side-up in no more than six moves?
If it’s possible, show how; if it’s not, say why.
The late Mr. Dawson Damer — ‘Hippy’ Damer, afterwards Lord Portarlington — was one of the most deservedly popular men in London and a great favourite of Queen Victoria. The Prince of Wales gave a garden party at Marlborough House to his mother, and to this gathering ‘Hippy’ Damer came — but came very much under the influence of ‘la dive bouteille.’ Spying the Queen he went up to her offered his hand cordially and said: ‘Gad! How glad I am to see you! How well you’re looking! But, I say, do forgive me — your face is, of course, very familiar to me; but I can’t for the life of me recall your name!’ The Queen took in the situation at once, and as she cordially grasped the hand extended to her, said smiling: ‘Oh, never mind my name, Mr. Damer — I’m very glad to see you. Sit down and tell me all about yourself.’
— Julian Osgood Field, Uncensored Recollections, 1924
Below: “Her Majesty has been the recipient of some remarkably addressed envelopes,” reported the Strand in 1891.
Mathematician Matthew Scroggs has released this year’s Christmas card for Chalkdust magazine.
Solve 10 mathematical puzzles and the answers will guide you in coloring the picture.
O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough,
Or both! O promissory notes of woe!
One time in Santa Fe N.M.
Ol’ Winfield Townley Scott and I … But whoa.
One can exert oneself, ff,
Or architect a heaven like Rimbaud,
Or if that seems, how shall I say, de trop,
One can at least write sonnets, a propos
Of nothing save the do-re-mi-fa-sol
Of poetry itself. Is not the row
Of perfect rhymes, the terminal bon mot,
Obeisance enough to the Great O?
“Observe,” said Chairman Mao to Premier Chou,
“On voyage à Parnasse pour prendre les eaux.
On voyage comme poisson, incog.”
— George Starbuck
Diagnosed with terminal melanoma at 50, Phoebe Snetsinger resolved to devote her remaining time to watching birds. Between 1981 and 1999, as her cancer went periodically into remission, she visited every continent several times over, traversing jungles, swamps, deserts, and mountains and surviving malaria, a boat accident, abduction in Ethiopia, and rape in Papua New Guinea. In 1995 she became the first person to see 8,000 species of bird, and in time she extended the list to 8,398, nearly 85 percent of the world’s known species. She died in 1999 when her van overturned during a birding trip in Madagascar. The last bird she’d observed was a red-shouldered vanga, a species that had been described as new to science only two years previously.
In her memoir, Birding on Borrowed Time, she wrote, “When I was given my death sentence by the doctors, one of my immediate reactions that I clearly remember was ‘Oh no — there are all those things I haven’t yet done, and now will never have a chance to do.’ … The preparation and primarily the birding itself, plus the record keeping afterwards, all enabled me to forget the threat to my life (or at least push it aside) and to immerse myself totally in what I was doing.”
Arthur Conan Doyle tells us little about James Moriarty, the criminal mastermind in the Sherlock Holmes stories. But he does mention one intriguing accomplishment in The Valley of Fear:
Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?
Mathematicians Alain Goriely and Simon P. Norton have both pointed out that in 1887 King Oscar II of Sweden offered a bounty for the solution to the n-body problem in celestial mechanics. Doyle’s story was set in 1888, so it’s possible that Moriarty had intended his book as his entry in this contest.
If he did, he was disappointed — the prize went to Henri Poincaré.
