Cafe Math

Before he turned physics upside down, a young Albert Einstein supposedly showed off his genius by devising a complex riddle involving a stolen exotic fish and a long list of suspects. Can you resist tackling a brain teaser written by one of the smartest people in history? Dan Van der Vieren shows how.

Should you take the bet?

The of and to. A in is I. That it, for you, was with on. As have ... but be they.

Holy moly I'm gonna tear my $100 bill into five and rearrange it and boom! I have $200.

The Infinite Hotel, a thought experiment created by German mathematician David Hilbert, is a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. Easy to comprehend, right? Wrong. What if it's completely booked but one person wants to check in? What about 40? Or an infinitely full bus of people? Jeff Dekofsky solves these heady lodging issues using Hilbert's paradox.

Can folding a piece of paper 45 times get you to the moon? By seeing what happens when folding just one piece of paper, we see the unbelievable potential of exponential growth. This lesson will leave you wanting to grab a piece of paper to see how many times you can fold it!

Light always travels at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. But if you're in motion too, you're going to perceive it as traveling even faster -- which isn't possible! In this second installment of a three-part series on space-time, CERN scientists Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie use a space-time diagram to analyze the sometimes confounding motion of light.

How do you investigate hypotheses? Do you seek to confirm your theory - looking for white swans? Or do you try to find black swans? I was startled at how hard it was for people to investigate number sets that didn't follow their hypotheses, even when their method wasn't getting them anywhere.