On monthly puzzles

This year, I’ve been collaborating with MoMath and Peter Winkler to put together a series of monthly puzzles. Peter has a great taste for brain-teasers whose solutions offer both surprise and delight, having written a few great books on the theme. You can find the short videos we’ve made for each puzzle so far this year here.

Puzzles are perhaps the only type of math content where I feel short-form videos are better than long-form videos. It’s nice to concisely hear the statement, but you don’t want the answer spoiled too soon. I’d be delighted if any reader here, for example, were nerd-sniped into thinking about any one of these next time they have a free moment alone with their thoughts.

Peter hosts Zoom sessions with MoMath for each solution, and at first, I started to make shorts for the solutions to each one as well, e.g., Jan and Feb. A few people naturally wondered what happened to the solutions for the rest. We have actually been producing them, e.g., for any patrons among you, here’s an early view of March’s puzzle, and here’s the one for the solution to the 10 points and disks puzzle, which I think is the hardest one so far this year.

What I realized is that it’ll be most fun and edifying to group solutions with a similar theme into long-form explainers, something similar to this video from a few years ago about puzzles in which increasing the dimensions can, like magic, make a difficult problem suddenly clearer.

This probably means those grouped solutions won’t come out until later in the year, but my hope is that this will give each one a bit of a deeper pedagogical purpose than simply saying “here’s a solution!” In the meantime, if people are given a little more time to ponder these in their free time, that doesn’t seem so bad to me.

If you have your own favorite puzzles with solutions that surprise and delight, please feel free to share.