You are participating in a holiday gift exchange with a few classmates. You each write down your own name on a slip of paper and fold it up. Then all the students place their names into a single hat.

Some say the reason most manhole covers are round is that a circle cannot fall through a smaller circular hole. Which of ...

A math puzzle is a type of brain teaser that tests the reader's critical thinking and problem-solving skills by challenging ...

Math is not everyone’s favorite, understandably. Hours of math homework and difficult equations can make anyone sour on the subject. But when math problems are outside of a school setting, there’s no ...

Halloween is scary, what with all the costumes and the ghosts and the amount of sugar in candy corn. Do you know what else is scary? Algebra, what with all the numbers and the rules and the math. So a ...

The inside of a bus may not seem like the ideal place to rekindle your interest in math, but a group of mathematicians is betting it will. Last month, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute of ...

The following is adapted from the introduction to “The Riddler: Fantastic Puzzles from FiveThirtyEight,” published by W. W. Norton & Co. It is in stores today! The world’s oldest collection of math ...

Jeff Smith's Math Puzzle for November 21, 2025 - ‘We fired our cannon 'til the barrel melted down, so we grabbed an alligator ...