This is a neat logic trick which allows you to flip over a stack of cards numbered 1-10. When you flip the back upright, they are in numerical order. There is a special way to make it work, so pay close attention to the video. I’ll show you exactly how it works.
Everyone old enough to remember the Rubik’s Cube craze of the 1980s in the USA also remembers how it was near impossible to solve the thing! Originally created by a professor of architecture Erno Rubik, it was sold to a toy company in 1980 as the “Magic Cube”.
To date, over 350 million cubes have been sold worldwide, making it the world’s top selling puzzle game, and most people think of it as the best-selling toy of all time as well.
The original goal of creating this object was to help teach his students how to create something that rotated independently in layers without falling apart. Rubik didn’t realize he had created a puzzle until he scrambled it, and it took him over a month to solve it the first time!
There are eight corners and twelve edges, and when you do the math to figure out the number of possible combinations the puzzle has, it’s about 43 quintillion, or:
43,252,003,274,489,856,000
So what do you do with this thing? How DO you solve it?
It has to do with identifying the different layers, and solving one layer at a time. Here’s how you can do it:
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Download the official solver’s guide here. Or you can build a LEGO machine like JP Brown did to solve it for you!
There’s also a World Cube Association where folks keep track of cube competitions and records. The fastest cube solve was set by Mats Valk in 2013 – he can solve it in under 6 seconds. Some of the more creative competitions include solving the cube while blindfolded (record is 23.8 seconds), with only one hand (record is 12.6 seconds), only using the feet (record is 27.93 seconds), and underwater using a single breath.
This is a really neat game invented in 1967 by two mathematicians that was soon after published in Scientific American, where it caught fire with people all over the world. It’s a very simple game with a lot of interesting mathematics in it, and all you need are two people, a pencil, and paper.
This is a really fun riddle! It’s a math logic puzzle involving the calendar that will really blow your mind. Pay close attention to the clues I give in the video and see if you can work out how it works. Pause the video at about the 1:30 mark if you would like to try and work out the answer before I show you how it works!
If you’ve watched my “What Is Math?” video, you’ve seen a sample of the Bagels math logic game. This is one of my family’s favorites! It’s a guessing game, but you can use logic and strategy in order to guess the numbers very quickly. In this video, I’ll show you in more detail how it works. I’ll also show you how to use the game to guess numbers even larger than three digits. Once you’ve mastered the strategies in this game, you’ll never lose another game of Mastermind again.
If a friend had chose a three-letter word and asked you to guess it, how would you start? It seems like it might take a while to narrow it down, right? This is a neat word guessing game that uses some strategy to make the guessing both a little easier and more fun. When you try to guess your partner’s three-letter word, they can simply give you one of two clues that will make it a bit easier to narrow down the answer. Watch the video for an explanation.
The first folks to play this game lived in the Roman Empire, but it was called Terni Lapilli and instead of having any number of pieces (X or O), each player only had three, so they had to move them around to keep playing. Historians have found the hatch grid marks all over Rome. They have also found them in Egypt!
In 1864, the British called it “noughts and crosses”, and it was considered a “children’s game”, since they would play it on their slates. In recent times (1952), OXO was one of the first known video games, as the computer played games against a person.
Tic-Tac-Toe can be fun, but when you get a “cat’s game” (no winner), it can get a little boring pretty quickly, right? In this video, I’ll show you some cool ways to change the game to make it more interesting by changing one or two of the basic rules. It’s much more engaging and strategic that way! Currently there are over 100 variations of Tic-Tac-Toe, and I’m going to show you my favorite ones. In fact, last time I taught a live science workshop, all 120 kids played this at the same time with squeals of delight!
Once in awhile, mathematicians come up against something that really seems impossible on the surface. These seemingly “impossibilities” not only cause them to sit up and take notice, but often to create new rules about the way math works, or at the very least, understand math a little better.
Cryptarithms are a puzzle where the digits are replaced by letters or symbols. When the numbers are replaced by letters of the alphabet and it spells something readable, it’s called Alphametics.