Category: Puzzles

jar-of-sweets

Counting Sweets in a Jar

Dear Dr Maths, At a recent fundraising event I attended there was an activity to guess the number of sweets in the jar. Is there a mathematical way to improve your chance of being correct?

maths-clock

Time on the maths clock

After a successful Valentine’s date, a colleague was feeling particularly generous and gave the Commercial Science team a clock as [...]
three-towers

Three lighthouses

There are three lighthouses on three neighbouring islands. The first one flashes its light for 3 seconds, then turns it [...]
tills-to-vanishing-point

Pricing in shops

Question one Many shops have many prices set just under a round figure, e.g. £9.99 instead of £10.00 or £99.95 [...]
elevator-buttons

Elevator puzzle

Question one Mark Smith now works on the 13th floor of a 15 floor office building in Central Europe. The [...]
kangaroo-sign

Down under puzzles

Question one There are estimated to be 34,303,677 kangaroos in Australia (source: Australian Government 2011). Assuming that they are evenly [...]
tire-change-puzzle

Paul and Guy’s flat tire

Paul and Guy both work at the same company, and car share to get to work. They also enjoy nights out during [...]
elf-holding-two-presents

Sled-packing with Santa

Santa has packed up all his presents into 16 boxes. Each box is a cube: the first is 1m×1m×1m, the second 2m×2m×2m, [...]
baubles

Baubles

A glass Christmas tree decoration is made from three different types of sphere. Seven small spheres, eight middle-sized spheres and [...]
fourth

Fourth powers

There are only three numbers (>1) that can be written as the sum of fourth powers of their digits […]