While preparing the table for dinner, wife came up with an idea to tease his mathematician husband. She asked her husband to pick nine toothpicks and make ten without breaking any toothpick.
The husband was also smart and did it within seconds. How ?
After teaching his class all about Roman numerals (X = 10, IX=9 and so on) the teacher asked his class to draw a single continuous line and turn IX into 6. The teacher's only stipulation was that the pen could not be lifted from the paper until the line was complete.
Consider all the numbers between 1 and 1 million. Among all these numbers, there is something very special about the number 8 and the number 2202. What is it?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.