Mar 5, 2016
In the US as well as in the UK, I hear complaints that the French are rude—particularly Parisians in the service industries, such as restaurant waiters. On the other side, Parisians sometimes make the same complaint of the tourists who come to town—and there are a lot...
Mar 31, 2014
I wrote about a brain teaser I encountered as a kid and challenged you to figure out if it has a solution, and if so, what that solution is. That brain teaser works like this: You have 12 identical coins. One of them is counterfeit. The counterfeit coin may be heavier...
Sep 19, 2012
People seem to like the brain teasers I’ve posted. So here’s another. I first ran across this when I was about 12 years old. I still remember it as one of the toughest brain teasers I ever faced. It is a very simple problem to explain, but the answer may...
Jul 16, 2012
Last week I posed a challenge that came from my high school computer teacher: Can you find an efficient method (or “algorithm”) to generate Pythagorean triplets? As a reminder, a Pythagorean triplet is a set of three integers that satisfy the Pythagorean...
Jul 9, 2012
In an earlier post I wrote about a brain teaser from middle school. Â Here’s one that is a bit more advanced. My high school computer teacher issued us a challenge: “I want you to write an algorithm to identify Pythagorean triplets.” At the time, I...