Catriona Shearer is a UK teacher who has received prominence on Twitter for posting various colorful geometry puzzles over the years.
Puzzle Prime is tirelessly looking all around the internet to find the very best puzzles and bring them all to puzzleprime.com.
Since 2018, Catriona Shearer, a UK teacher, has been posting on her Twitter various colorful geometry puzzles. In this mini-course, we cover some of her best problems and provide elegant solutions to them. Use the pagination below to navigate the puzzles.
The evil witch has left Rapunzel and the prince in the center of a completely dark, large, square prison room. The room is guarded by four silent monsters in each of its corners. Rapunzel and the prince need to reach the only escape door located in the center of one of the walls, without getting near the foul beasts. How can they do this, considering they can not see anything and do not know in which direction to go?
The prince must stay in the center of the room and hold Rapunzel’s hair, gradually releasing it. Then, Rapunzel must walk in circles around the prince, until she gets to the walls and finds the escape door.
Borromean rings are rings in the 3-dimensional space, linked in such a way that if you cut any of the three rings, all of them will be unlinked (see the image below). Show that rigid circular Borromean rings cannot exist.
Assume the opposite. Imagine the rings have zero thickness and reposition them in such a way, that two of them, say ring 1 and ring 2, touch each other in two points. These two rings lie either on a sphere or a plane which ring 3 must intersect in four points. However, this is impossible.
There is a square cake at a birthday party attended by a dozen people. How can the cake be cut into twelve pieces, so that every person gets the same amount of cake, and also the same amount of frosting?
Remark: The decoration of the cake is put aside, nobody eats it.
Divide the boundary of the cake into twelve equal parts, then simply make cuts passing through the separation points and the center. This way all tops and bottoms of the formed pieces will have equal areas, and also all their sides will have equal areas. Since all pieces have the same height, their volumes will be equal as well.
Find all configurations of four points in the plane, such that the pairwise distances between the points take at most two different values.
All 5 configurations are shown below: a square, a rhombus with 60°-120°-60°-120°, an equilateral triangle with its center, an isosceles triangle with 75°-75°-30° and its center, and a quadrilateral with 75°-150°-75°-150°.
Please confirm you want to block this member.
You will no longer be able to:
Please note: This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
