Can you solve it? A magical melody from the Mozart of math
Terence Tao teaser time Today’s puzzle is set by Terence Tao, who may be the world’s most famous mathematician. Tao, aged 51, has been a global phenomenon since the age of ten, when he became the youngest competitor at the International Maths Olympiad, a record he still holds. For the last three decades he has been a professor at UCLA, where he has been garlanded with prizes, and where one of his colleagues famously said: “Terry is like Mozart: mathematics just flows out of him.” This week Tao publishes Six Maths Essentials, his first work aimed at a general audience. The puzzle below reflects ideas in the book. He said: “I like this puzzle in that it naturally introduces algebraic ways of thinking as the most efficient way to solve the problem: working out small examples by hand can give some valuable initial intuition, but it will be algebra that lets you solve the entire problem in a…
