Today's Puzzle
Tuesday, February 23
This sentence in a recent news article made me chuckle:
To put it into proper perspective, there are 60 times more endangered condors in the wild as there are on a ____ ______.
A condor, of course, is a very large bird with a wild population of ~300 (see left). But the article was reporting the fifth known occurrence—anywhere, ever—of a very different kind of condor. The event reported in the article happened on a grassy site near the Oakland Zoo. What two words go in the blanks?
Hint 1 of 2
One might say the kind of condor referred to in the article requires a stroke of genius.
Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution
Here's a way to make the current year from thirty-one 2's:
… OK, maybe that's not very impressive. Your challenge for today is to make 2021 out of as few 2's as possible. You can use addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponents, and parentheses. And what the heck, factorials too, if it helps. No concatenation (i.e. you can't just glue two 2's to make twenty-two).
We'll set par at eleven, as that's the best I could do.
Solution
In the Desmos window at right, you can scroll through all the answers that were at or under par. Jacob scored a birdie (one under par), and the winners scored eagles (two under par) (2 of 2).
Congratulations to yesterday's winners Atticus, Peter M., Leo S., Kathy, and Zach G., and thanks to everybody who submitted an answer!
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.