Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog

Vouchers are supposed to make shopping cheaper, right? Apparently, the shopkeeper in the following puzzle didn’t know. By the way, the puzzle is from Mathematical Puzzles and Curiosities, my book with Ivo David and Yogev Shpilman.

I have always liked the following idea for education. Ask students to watch a lecture on some topic at home, and then do the homework with the teacher in class.

The United States has an enormous number of teachers, but only a small fraction of them are truly fantastic lecturers. So why should every teacher give essentially the same lecture? Why not record the best l...

Here is a famous riddle.

Puzzle. A police officer saw a truck driver going the wrong way down a one-way street, but didn’t try to stop him. Why?

The standard answer: the truck driver was walking.

My students are usually very inventive, but this time they came up with only two alternative answers worth mentioning:

The tr...

AI is changing mathematics very fast. I personally write papers faster and make far fewer typos. My friends, who are research mathematicians, are scared that they might soon become irrelevant. But what about math majors?

A math degree is extremely versatile. Math majors find jobs in finance, insurance, cryptography, computer science, and so on. Not to mention teachi...

I like pets, but, for various reasons, I can’t have one. So I flirt with other people’s pets. There is a black cat across the road who likes sitting in my driveway. So I had to buy a new car with a backup camera to make sure the cat is safe. As you can imagine, I couldn’t skip this problem about cats posted by Konstantin Knop on Facebook.

Puzzle. O...