WSJ’s Varsity Math is a weekly dose of challenging word puzzles, created by the National Museum of Mathematics. The museum’s Glen Whitney guides viewers through “Crosstraining,” a word game he created.
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The Varsity Math team is helping out at a local middle-school math tournament, and the following two problems caught their eye. Both relate to the diagram above, in which all of the quadrilaterals are squares and all of the smallest squares have side length equal to one unit.
WSJ Puzzles is the online home for America’s most elegant, adventurous, and addictive crosswords and other word games. Try your hand at our daily crossword Monday to Friday, from a roster of the nation’s best constructors. The Friday crossword features a contest: a “puzzle within a puzzle” for you to solve (usually a single word or phrase such as a celebrity’s name, a country, or a movie title).
On Saturday you’ll find a large weekend-size crossword, plus a second specialty word puzzle, drawn from a rotating assortment of cryptics, acrostics and puzzles with ingenious new shapes, from master creators Emily Cox, Henry Rathvon, Patrick Berry, and Mike Shenk. In addition, you’ll find Varsity Math, a weekly math puzzle created by the National Museum of Mathematics.
Answers to the daily crosswords (Monday – Friday) appear next to the following day’s puzzle. (Online you can see them in the PDF.) The answer to the Friday contest puzzle appears with the Monday crossword.
Answers to the Saturday crossword and the second specialty word puzzle appear the following Saturday. In print, you’ll find them in the Review section. Online, you can click on a Saturday puzzle and then click on the SOLUTION tab.
Answers to the Varsity Math puzzles appear the following week. (Note: some answers are delayed because they are part of a “relay” where the answer to one week is required to solve another week’s puzzle.)
Note: We know the Java app that runs the interactive crosswords on our site is old and doesn’t work well with some browsers. We’re working on improving that. You can also solve the crosswords on the WSJ iPad app.
To reach us, email puzzles@wsj.com. See the Community Rules and report comments to moderator@wsj.com.
