Today's Puzzle
Monday, January 11
There are two reasons I didn't include Raymond Queneau's book
Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Trillion Poems) in Friday's puzzle. First, probably nobody would have heard of it. Second, I would have had to extend the "ruler" much farther.
Queneau's book really does contain a hundred trillion poems, though... or perhaps I should say potential poems. How is this possible?
Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution
Can you match these six literary items to their positions on the ruler?
Original Hint
To make everything fit, I used a logarithmic ruler. The ruler runs from 100 to 105.
New Hint #1
Each picture represents a word from the title of a well-known book. (You might know some of them better as movies.)
New Hint #2
Each of those books has an associated number (not the numbers 1–6 next to the drawings—those are just for identification).
New Hint #3
Here's how you read numbers off a log ruler:
Solution
1: C
2: D
3: B
4: F
5: A
6: E
The drawings represent title words from The Twenty-One Balloons, 101 Dalmatians, The Three Musketeers, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (that's the UEFA logo), The Two Towers, and The Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights).
Congratulations to yesterday's full and partial solvers Hazel, Maddy, Peter M., Inca, Anna J., Charlie, Yana, and Mr. Gregg. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!
About This Site
Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."
Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.
Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to December 2020.