Today’s puzzle challenge comes from the brilliant mind of Randall Munroe, known for his webcomic xkcd and bestselling book What If? Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, is a renowned science humorist in the world.
The first puzzle presented today is a clever play on self-reference, where readers are tasked with finding all possible ways to fill in three blanks to make three statements true. It’s a puzzle within a puzzle, adding a meta-joke element to the challenge.
The second puzzle, crafted by RGee Watkins, features a Venn diagram made up of four squares with ten regions labeled A to J. Each letter corresponds to a number between 1 and 10, with no repeated numbers across regions. The goal is to determine the value of D, the intersection of all four squares, with the sums of the regions in each square being equal.
Both puzzles are featured in The Mathematical Playground, a collection of engaging problems from Math Horizons, the undergraduate magazine of the Mathematical Association of America. The book is a treasure trove of stimulating material for puzzle enthusiasts.
For those interested in exploring more of Munroe’s work, the 10th-anniversary edition of What If? will be released in the UK on November 14. Additionally, readers can check out “Think Twice: Solve the Simple Puzzles (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong,” the latest book by the journalist, available in the US as “Puzzle Me Twice.”
As a journalist who has been sharing puzzles on alternate Mondays since 2015, I am always on the lookout for intriguing challenges. If you have a puzzle suggestion, feel free to email me. Let’s keep the puzzle-solving spirit alive and continue to enjoy the brain-teasing world of Randall Munroe and other puzzle creators.
