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Post Closed as "no longer relevant" by Yemon Choi, Mark Meckes, Andrés E. Caicedo, Kim Morrison
Bounty Ended with Malik Younsi's answer chosen by Richard Dore
Bounty Started worth 50 reputation by Richard Dore
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Charles Matthews
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Math Puzzlespuzzles for Dinnerdinner

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Richard Dore
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Math Puzzles for Dinner

You're hanging out with a bunch of other mathematicians - you go out to dinner, you're on the train, you're at a department tea, et cetera. Someone says something like "A group of 100 people at a party are each receive hats with different prime numbers and ..." For the next few minutes everyone has fun solving the problem together.

I love puzzles like that. But there's a problem -- I running into the same puzzles over and over. But there must be lots of great problems I've never run into. So I'd like to hear problems that other people have enjoyed, and hopefully everyone will learn some new ones.

So: What are your favorite dinner conversation math puzzles?

I don't want to provide hard guidelines. But I'm generally interested in problems that are mathematical and not just logic puzzles. They shouldn't require written calculations or a convoluted answer. And they should be fun - with some sort of cute step, aha moment, or other satisfying twist. I'd prefer to keep things pretty elementary, but a cool problem requiring a little background is a-okay.

One problem per answer.

If you post the answer, please obfuscate it with something like rot13. Don't spoil the fun for everyone else.