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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Monday, September 28
When I was nine, I loved this joke: "If vegetable oil comes from vegetables, where does baby oil come from?"
Now I'm thirty-seven and sad at the thought of someone squeezing my baby for her precious oil. 😥 But I still love some good old lexical ambiguity!
  1. 👶 What do you call it when you erase all the data on your baby?
  2. 👶 What do you call equations that plot a baby? (Hmm, neither this nor this is quite right...)
  3. 👶 What's another name for a high chair?
  4. 👶 What did the caveman say when he discovered his baby was infested?
  5. 👶 And what did the caveman say when his baby was all better? (Other cavemen were confused about why he would seemingly reference a musical instrument.)

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

Can you name the two cookie brands shown at left? They are produced in New England and Germany, respectively, and both were invented in 1891, but no one is sure which came first.

(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
yeahhh


Solution
Wait, what?

(Image created by Aiden.)

WAIT.  WHAT

The calculus controversy was an argument between the mathematicians Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over who had first invented calculus.

As it happens, Fig Newtons are named after a town in Massachusetts... but Leibniz cookies actually are named after the mathematician Leibniz.

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Aiden (emeritus), Andrew, Anna K., Atticus, Agniv, Jessica, Yana, Jacob C., Leo S. (who knows and loves both cookies), Maddy and family, Charlie, maybe Peter M., 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 June 2020.