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A personal investigation of Conway's Rational Tangles. What were the interesting questions that needed to be asked, and where did they lead?
Suppose you are a bellringer. Can you find the changes so that, starting and ending with a round, all the 24 possible permutations are rung once each and only once?
Sanjay Joshi, age 17, The Perse Boys School, Cambridge followed up the Madrass College class 2YP article with more thoughts on the problem of the number of ways of expressing an integer as the sum of odd numbers.
Class 2YP from Madras College was inspired by the problem in NRICH to work out in how many ways the number 1999 could be expressed as the sum of 3 odd numbers, and this is their solution.
Your partner chooses two beads and places them side by side behind a screen. What is the minimum number of guesses you would need to be sure of guessing the two beads and their positions?
Is it possible to use all 28 dominoes arranging them in squares of four? What patterns can you see in the solution(s)?
I was in my car when I noticed a line of four cars on the lane next to me with number plates starting and ending with J, K, L and M. What order were they in?
How many different ways can I lay 10 paving slabs, each 2 foot by 1 foot, to make a path 2 foot wide and 10 foot long from my back door into my garden, without cutting any of the paving slabs?
How many ways can you write the word EUROMATHS by starting at the top left hand corner and taking the next letter by stepping one step down or one step to the right in a 5x5 array?
Libby Jared helped to set up NRICH and this is one of her favourite problems. It's a problem suitable for a wide age range and best tackled practically.
A standard die has the numbers 1, 2 and 3 are opposite 6, 5 and 4 respectively so that opposite faces add to 7? If you make standard dice by writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 on blank cubes you will find there are 2 and only 2 different standard dice. Can you prove this ?
How many tricolour flags are possible with 5 available colours such that two adjacent stripes must NOT be the same colour. What about 256 colours?
From a group of any 4 students in a class of 30, each has exchanged Christmas cards with the other three. Show that some students have exchanged cards with all the other students in the class. How many such students are there?
Given a 2 by 2 by 2 skeletal cube with one route `down' the cube. How many routes are there from A to B?
Six points are arranged in space so that no three are collinear. How many line segments can be formed by joining the points in pairs?
Imagine you have six different colours of paint. You paint a cube using a different colour for each of the six faces. How many different cubes can be painted using the same set of six colours?