The following is a guest post from A.J. Jacobs (@ajjacobs), a bestselling author, journalist, and human guinea pig. It is excerpted from his new book The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life. A.J. has written four New York Times bestsellers, including The Year of Living Biblically (for which he followed all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible) and Thanks a Thousand (for which he went around the world and thanked every person who had even the smallest role in making his morning cup of coffee possible). He has given four TED talks with a combined 10M+ views. He contributes to NPR and The New York Times and wrote the article “My Outsourced Life,” which was featured in The 4-Hour Workweek. He was once the answer to one down in The New York Times crossword puzzle.
You can find my interview from 2016 with A.J here, and you can find last week’s interview with A.J. here.
Please enjoy!
Enter A.J…
My father was the one to introduce me to math puzzles.
He didn’t focus on the traditional kind. His were weirder than that, more homegrown. My dad’s greatest joy comes from baffling unsuspecting people—strangers, friends, family, whomever—and he often accomplishes this with math-based hijinks.
One time, when I was about eight years old, I asked my dad how fast race cars went. This was before Google, so my father was my version of a search engine.
“The fastest ones get up to about 50 million,” my dad said.
Even to my unschooled mind, 50 million miles per hour seemed off.
“That doesn’t sound right,” I said.
“Yes it is,” he said. “50 million fathoms per fortnight.”
I just stared at him.
“Oh, you wanted miles per hour?” my dad said. “I thought you meant in fathoms per fortnight.”
As you might know, a fathom equals six feet, and a fortnight is two weeks. My dad had decided that fathoms per fortnight would be his default way to measure speed, on the probably correct theory that no one else on earth had ever used that metric. I thanked him for this helpful information.
So, as you can see, I was exposed to recreational math early on, leaving me with a mixed legacy—a love of numbers, a healthy skepticism about numbers, and paranoia.
For this puzzle project, I’ve bought a dozen books with math and logic brainteasers. Reading these books often induces a mild panic. How would I know how many spheres can simultaneously touch a center sphere? I can’t even figure out where to start. What’s the entry point?
To remedy this problem, I decided to consult one of the world’s experts on math puzzles, hoping to learn some of her methods. Tanya Khovanova greets me on a video call. But before I’m allowed to ask her anything, she has a question for me.
“I have two coins,” she says, in a Russian accent. “Together they add up to 15 cents. One of them is not a nickel. What are the two coins?”
My palms begin to sweat. I did not expect a pop quiz.
Maybe she’s talking about foreign coins? Maybe rubles are involved, I say?
“Not foreign coins,” she says. “American currency.”
Continue reading “The Path to Better Thinking Through Puzzles and Riddles”
