Category: Games and Puzzles

The Magic Circle Puzzle

Games and Puzzles

I was browsing a copy of the  The Mathematical Palette, the book where I got the title of my other blog and I saw an interesting puzzle about magic circles.

magic circle

Magic circles are quite similar to magic squares.  In the magic circle above, we have to place the numbers 1 through 9 in the interior of the red circles.  If we add the numbers on any circle (blue or yellow) and the number at the center, the sum should be equal to the sum of each “diagonal” of the circle.

For a little trivia, magic circles are said to have been invented by Japanese mathematician Kittoku Isomura (c. 1660).

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Can you solve the hardest Sudoku puzzle yet?

Games and Puzzles

Arto Inkala, a Finnish mathematician, claims to have created the most difficult Sudoku puzzle yet. According to Inkala, it took him three months to finish the construction of the puzzle.

sudoku

Can you solve this sudoku puzzle?

Sudoku is a number placement puzzle. The objective of the player is to fill a 9 x 9 grid with numbers from 1 to 9 so that each column, row, and block (3 x 3 sub grids) contains all the digits. The puzzle was popularized by the Japanese company Nikoli in 1986.

Source: Yahoo News

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Counting the Number of Squares on a Chess Board

Games and Puzzles, High School Mathematics

Chess is one good source of mathematical problems and puzzles.  In this post, we discuss one of the most basic problems in chess:  Counting the number of squares on the chessboard.

How many squares are there in a standard chessboard measuring 8 by 8 units? » Read more

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