Blog

A recipe for making ice cream requires 1 litre of milk. Unfortunately, you only have an empty 5-litre bucket and an empty 3-litre bottle. How will you measure just 1 litre of milk for your recipe?

Alice forgot the code to get into her computer. She knows it was a number with three digits, like 286 or 935. All she can remember is that the first digit is the second digit minus 3. The second digit is 4 times the third digit. And two of the digits are the same. Can you help Alice get into her computer?

Do you have a mathematician in your life? Chances are, they’re a big fan of the number Pi. Celebrate Pi Day with them on 14 March!

Last October, an amateur mathematician named Luke Durant discovered the largest known prime number, M136279841, a number with more than 41 million digits. Luke used a global network of computers powered by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which are widely used in developing artificial intelligence algorithms. Luke’s breakthrough marked the first use of this technology to uncover a prime of this size.

Sam arrives first to her after school Maths Club meeting. She discovers that her teacher has left a basket of Valentine’s Day chocolates. It comes with the instructions to share the chocolate evenly among the six students in the club… but Sam eats a few chocolates before anyone notices!

Rita is making lamingtons for her birthday party and cuts them precisely into 5-centimetre cubes. While playing around with an antique balance scale, she discovers that one lamington is equal to 50 grams plus half a lamington. At her party, she eats one and a half lamingtons. How much did Rita’s dessert weigh?

Double Helix Extra readers really got busy with brainteasers in 2024! Let’s do a count down of your top 5…

A famous person built a square house so that the windows on all four sides look south. Where is this house? (And can you name the famous person?)

Farmer Doolittle has a farm with just cows and chickens. The farmer counts up all the animals and discovers that there are 43 heads and 120 legs on the farm (not counting the farmers). How many cows live on farmer Doolittle’s farm?

We’ve written a code using two different prime numbers less than 10. We then multiplied these two primes and used the resulting “code number” to shift the alphabet forward to new letters. Can you use the clues above to decode this message: DRO QYVN SC LEBSON SX DRO QKBNOX.