H E L L O
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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Tuesday, December 8
Breakfast time! What specific item is this nutrition label from?

Hint Are you frozen up? Focus your mind and you can figure it out.

   


     Note: Clicking "Submit" will send your response to Dr. Shapiro.

Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

In the bar chart shown at left, what word has been covered by a pink rectangle?

The "data" represented in the chart are admittedly subjective, and were made up by Dr. Shapiro (who is curious if you'd rank any of the items differently).

Hint I thought about adding a column labeled "Anything 8 times", but it would have dwarfed all the other bars.

Solution The covered word is "fold". As Graham surmised, this puzzle was inspired by the recent announcement of an AI-powered advance in the protein folding problem. I guess we'll no longer need to entice people to solve protein folding by calling it a game. Now if only AI could fold my sheets...

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Atticus, Yana, Jacob C., Charlie, Kate, Graham, and Mr. Gregg. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

Also, a belated shoutout to Jacob and Yana for their top score of 8/10 in my left-right quiz. Thanks to them, the distribution of scores was left, I mean, right-skewed:

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 November 2020.