Puzzles

Ah, spring. As Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, it’s your favorite season. Humans and animals look to you to balance [...]

You and the professor have driven your DeLorean back to the past to fix issues with the spacetime continuum caused by your [...]

Hundreds of years ago, your ancestor stole a magical tarot deck from Fate herself— and it came with a terrible cost. Once [...]

A few years ago, the king decided your life would be forfeit unless you tripled the gold coins in his treasury. Fortunately, [...]

The fabled Mirzakhani wand is the most powerful magical item ever created. And that’s why the evil wizard Moldevort is [...]

Once every century, the world’s greatest spiders gather to compete in a series of grueling games. The winner will become [...]

The underworld is overcrowded, and Zeus has ordered Hades to let some spirits out. Hades arranges all the souls of the dead [...]

You’re a biologist on a mission to keep the rare honeybee Apis Trifecta from going extinct. The last 60 bees of the [...]

Ragnarok: The fabled end of the world, when giants, monsters, and Norse gods battle for the future. The gods were winning [...]

The evil wizard MoldeVort has been trying to kill you for years, and today it looks like he’s going to succeed. But your [...]

According to legend, once every thousand years a host of sea monsters emerges from the depths to demand tribute from the [...]

A bug in the superconductor system has trapped your team in 11 separate dimensions. Can you get them back home [...]

An ancient, abandoned alien space station has been discovered. Can you beat everyone in the galaxy and reach it [...]

You’ve promised to get your son the cutest creature in creation: the cuddly. Can you outsmart the cuddly incubator and go [...]

A shooting star crashes onto Earth and unleashes a hideous, rampaging blob. Can you stop it from destroying the [...]

You’re a bank robber trying to escape from jail. Can you solve the riddle to get past the fence to freedom? — Your [...]

You’re a vampire hunter entering the enemy’s lair. Can you outsmart this tricky brainteaser and vanquish the [...]

You and your brother have discovered another realm and set off exploring the new wonderful world. Along the way, you see a [...]

Your professor has accidentally stepped through a time portal in his physics lab. You’ve got just a minute to jump through [...]

You’re on the trail of a werewolf that’s been terrorizing your town. After months of detective work, you’ve narrowed [...]

The good news is that your experimental robo-ants are a success. The bad news is that you accidentally gave them the ability [...]

Your team has developed a probe to study an alien monolith. It needs protective coatings — in red, purple or green — to [...]

A hostile artificial intelligence called NIM has taken over the world’s computers. You’re the only person skilled enough [...]

The villainous Dr. Schrödinger has developed a growth ray and intends to create an army of giant cats to terrorize the [...]

After months of travel, you’ve arrived at Duonia, home to the famous temple that’s the destination of your pilgrimage. [...]

You’ve been chosen as a champion to represent your wizarding house in a deadly duel against two rival magic schools. Your [...]

What have you been doing during this summer vacation? Did you sit around a table with your friends and family and play a [...]

Be it in studies, work or life in general, we are often confronted with hurdles, which seem insurmountable to begin with. We [...]

We’ve all played with coins at one point of time or another. But have you ever tried rotating one around another, [...]

Have you ever been in a position where saying “I don’t know” eventually lets you know the information you are [...]

You might have encountered triangles that connect three numbers based on their sum and differences. What if we decide to [...]

When everything seems to be going against you, can you still say for certain that something will surely happen? Daniel [...]

Many things in our world move continuously. Continuous movement is one of those ideas that we all grasp naturally, but is [...]

After another break, I’m returning to puzzles from my Mathematician at Play column from The Hindu in School. Also, I’ll [...]

After a brief hiatus, we’re back with the next Mathematician at Play puzzle! Check below for the solution. The problem of [...]

One of the delightful aspects of shapes is how they can be cut up and recombined in surprising ways. Daniel Finkel does just [...]

There is nothing more exciting to a mathematician than when the same behaviour emerges in dissimilar situations. The three [...]

Games have inspired mathematical puzzles since people began playing them. A puzzle is a kind of solitaire, after all. Join [...]

Have you ever tried your hand at those puzzles where you are asked to draw a figure without lifting your pencil or redrawing [...]

Witnessing billiard balls ricochet o the cushion of a pool table, strike each other, and sink into the pocket on the table [...]

There is a long, beautiful history of thinking about numbers and shapes as two aspects of the same idea. And there are all [...]

Do numbers scare you? Are you petrified every time your math teacher turns to you for the answers? Try out these puzzles, [...]

Do you start rummaging your brain every time a problem is posed to determine the area of a shape? And do you often give up [...]

I’ve been collaborating with the English-language newspaper in India called The Hindu for the past few months, producing [...]