math puzzles

Sometime around junior high, this Weizmann science writer stumbled upon Mathematical Games, the late Martin Gardner's monthly math puzzle at the back of my mom's Scientific American, and I became a devotee. The best ones, of course, were those that required a little sideways thinking, and these yielded the pleasure of that "Aha" moment when the answer became clear. (For more on the neurobiology of the Aha moment, look at our site.) So it is no surprise (to me at least) that of the hundreds of science education programs offered through the Davidson Institute of Science Education (the…