Numerical Brain Teasers: Exercise Your Mind

Challenge your brain with math! Using nothing more than basic arithmetic and logic, you'll be thrilled as answers slot into place. Whether purely for fun or to test your knowledge, you'll sharpen your problem-solving skills and flex your mental muscles. All you need is logical thought, a little patience, and a clear mind. There are no gotchas here. These puzzles are the perfect introduction to or refresher for math concepts you may have only just learned or long since forgotten. Get ready to have more fun with numbers than you've ever had before. Engage your analytical side with these numerical brain teasers. Math and logic puzzles help you stretch your mind to think in new ways. They flex your lateral thinking as you work through fresh problem styles. Each puzzle type comes with an explanation, a method for solving them, and solutions if you get stuck. The puzzles in this book are short, self-contained, and "gritty." They offer an enjoyable challenge and are designed to be solvable within a few minutes. You only need basic arithmetic to solve these puzzles; no advanced math required. There's plenty of variety to keep things fresh. From wandering digits to magic triangles, from summing grids to water pails, you'll find something that catches your interest. Each puzzle is brief, so use them as a warm-up to your daily work, for a delightful diversion on your coffee break, or solve a few while you wind down for the day. A good puzzle has a bit of crunch to it. It challenges, rewards, and then allows you to move on with life, having entertained yourself or learned something. Puzzles are momentary delights. My best-selling iOS apps were built around number-, word-, and logic-puzzles. This book collects styles of number-based puzzles. It’s full of quick brain-teasing games. It’s a mix of puzzles and storytelling so I can share my delight of these numeric conundrums with you. Each chapter is devoted to a different style. You’ll find a mix of traditional and new puzzles, unified by their focus on arithmetic, geometry, and logic. These puzzles allow you to explore a style of math head-scratcher and then test out your skills on real challenges. This puzzle comes straight from my time in grad school. It was a challenge in an algorithms class where you study how to compute answers. Each approach can take more or less time to finish. They also occupy different computer resources. These are important lessons to learn before working as a programmer. Classic problems like these help students understand how to make programs efficient. They’re also fun on their own. Grab a pencil and your thinking cap, and get solving!