Puzzle Description:

Ok, this is my first puzzle, I hope it is fun to solve (solvable at least). I hope you know the answer to this memorable equation, too ;)

#1: Nancy Snyder (naneki) on May 16, 2008

I must be hungry...I was hoping for a "Fig Newton" lol

thanks for posting your first puzzle...more please :)

Thank you very much :)

I never do guessing puzzles and for this one I pretty much guessed my way through the parenthesis to get going, but it was fun indeed.

I used edge logic on the 3 clue in row 5 to get some dots. Later I used edge logic on the 16 clue in column 40 to finish out the closed parenthesis. Later again, I used edge logic on the 12 clue in column 6 to get two more dots.

For the next part, I used some internal edge logic on row 11. Focus on the 5 clue and look at columns 10-12. If you try to extend the 5 clue in row 11 to column 10 (so 4 of the 5 would be in columns 10-13), then you would have to fill in R12C10-R12C12 which would make row 12 invalid. So R11C10 is a dot. More line logic. Then more edge logic to finish out the open parenthesis.

This was a lot of fun to solve.

Found to be logically solvable by Gator.

It was a rather challenging and to me (trained somewhat in mathematics) rewarding puzzle. I assume that you are refereeing to the binomial expansion where (a+b)^2=a^2+2ab+b^2. Not to be pedantic but I hope I can give some interesting information. The 4th century BC Greek, Euclid, is the first historically verifiable person to find the solution for (a+b)^2. The 3rd century BC Indian, Pingala, found (a+b)^n for integer n higher than 2.

Newton's contribution, which is significant, was to derive a formula for (a+b)^n for arbitrary positive integer n rather than relying on computing all of the solutions in a reference book. The generalized formula has been refined over the years and is known as the binomial theorem.

Not fun for me.

I think I used parenthesis logic (rotated smile logic) to solve this.


Edit: I marked it as a hint.

#8 SHOULD BE A HINT.

Still, Aurelian, that's a good idea - I didn't think of that.

I got stuck after completing the right parenthesis, so I used algebraic logic - in the spirit of the puzzle - to "prove" that there had to be a left parenthesis (which I had already started, so I knew where it was). I'm a stickler for solving logically, no matter how obvious the picture is, but I think this counts!

Goto next topic

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