Puzzles Archive

I really like puzzles! The Riddler (now The Fiddler) gives me a chance to explore something new each week — sometimes analytically, sometimes computationally, sometimes artistically.

“Fiddler on the Proof” offers weekly mathematical puzzles as well as other discussion about the puzzling community. The Fiddler is a spiritual successor to The Riddler column at FiveThirtyEight, which ran for eight years under the stewardship of Zach Wissner-Gross and Ollie Roeder.
The Fiddler on Substack

Below is a collection of my solutions, spanning the FiveThirtyEight era and beyond.

2023

Date Puzzle My Solution Code
Jan 27 Five-letter guessing game blog
Jan 23 Drone vs. scooter metric blog

2022

Date Puzzle My Solution Code
Dec 16 Gift exchange chaos blog
Oct 21 Mexican Lottery blog
Oct 14 Birthday collisions blog
Sept 16 Longest anigram blog
Sept 9 Cookie sheet packing blog
July 1 Two Astronomers’ Towers PDF
June 24 Goat tower parking PDF
June 17 Elevensies / urn probabilities PDF
May 13 Nonconformist dice PDF
Jan 7 Triangle trek PDF

2021

Date Puzzle My Solution Code
Apr 23 Random voting PDF
Apr 16 Lunar phase speed PDF
Apr 9 One-way out PDF code
Apr 2 Outthink the Sphinx PDF
Mar 26 March Mathness PDF
Mar 19 Square residues mod 10 PDF
Mar 12 Biggest pie PDF
Mar 5 Batting .299 PDF
Feb 19 Riddler Jenga (link coming)
Dec 13 Fencing Relay PDF

Older Solutions

Some earlier solutions are still available at my old site. Others may eventually be added here as I find time to polish them.