Blog

Here’s a quick puzzle for you – this square is too wide for its envelope. Can you find a way to make it fit?

The numbers that we use are not the only way to write numbers. You might know how to count with tally marks, or read Roman numerals. But there are plenty of other ways to write numbers. This one comes from the Maya people.

Here are two tricky puzzles, which look strangely similar. Did we somehow get a puzzle inside your puzzle? You will need Scissors Copy of the printouts, which you can download here (two pages) What to do

Many people know how to play solitaire or patience, but there are actually lots of different one-player card games. This version of patience has a bit of addition, and also some tricky strategic thinking.

In this trick, you’ll wrap a shoelace around a pencil and a strip of cardboard. The string seems to pass straight through both, tearing the cardboard, but leaving the pencil untouched!

Feeling festive? This cool mathematical bauble is fun to make, and looks great too!

Picture this: you’ve just bought a nice little cake, just for you. Then your friends show up, wanting a piece. Lucky for you, mathematicians have developed some pretty cool ways of sharing.

Let’s look at a few interesting patterns you can get by dividing. Some of these patterns need a lot of digits, so get the best calculator you can find.

There are plenty of patterns inside a flower. Let’s follow one and see what drawing we get!

Tired of tic-tac-toe? Try Achi, a trickier game from the African country of Ghana.