On Bank Holiday Friday a maths puzzle written by SMSAS Lecture, Dr Daniel Bearup, featured as the ‘Puzzle for Today’ on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme.
The puzzles are extremely popular and are certainly an excellent way to get your brain firing on all cylinders in the morning.
Daniel’s puzzle is an alphametic, also known as a cryptarithm, meaning that unknown numbers are replaced with letters in an equation. The goal is to identify the digit that corresponds with each letter.
Here is Daniel’s puzzle in full:
In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 our government has enforced a lockdown.
Discover which digit each letter represents in the following equation:
SCHOOL
+ SHOPS
= CLOSED
We hope you have managed to solve it by yourself, but for those of you still scratching your heads you can find the solution here.
Daniel joined SMSAS in 2017 and his research areas of interest are mathematical biology and mathematical ecology. Daniel regularly creates maths puzzles, plays chess and other strategy games competitively, paints, bakes, enjoys classical music, and, increasingly, tries to keep his daughter out of trouble.
The ‘Today’ programme is on Monday to Saturday and its presenters discuss the early-morning news and current affairs. It is the station’s most popular programme and draws in around seven million listeners a week. Each episode features a ‘Puzzle for Today’ and the archive can be found here and Daniel’s puzzle is number 735.
