Math Puzzle: Fun with Matchsticks
June 16th, 2009
| Categories: Logic, Math Puzzles
Level of Difficulty: Highschool
This week, six puzzles with matchsticks! I’m going to take a break from writing for a change and let this little Youtube video I’ve created explain it all:
In case you’ll need them, solutions will be published in a couple of days, so check back soon!
EDITED, 17/June/2009: a solution has been published here.
In puzzle #2, did you mean to create 4 identical squares by moving 4 matches? That’s what you said, but the image on the screen had 3.
Thank you for pointing out that mistake. I meant to say “3 identical squares”. What you see on the screen is the correct version. I’ve annotated the video to point this out as well.
For the last puzzle, does the shape have to be contiguous, or can it be composed of smaller disjoint parts? It’s easy to do if you can sum the areas of different segments, but I haven’t figured out a continuous shape.
Yes, it has to be continuous.
I just figured it out. A lot of mathematical calculation resulted in a simple solution that I should have seen from the beginning. Thanks for the puzzles; I enjoyed these.