Test your brain power
Ready to test your little grey cells? Imperial’s best minds set the ultimate puzzle challenge.
Hard
What links the following sets:
Refused to kowtow in 1792, prosecuted Bubba, old Tippecanoe, the sealed-train traveller?
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The answer to this puzzle is:
The Beatles: MacCartney Embassy, Ken Starr, William Henry Harrison, and Vladimir Lenin
Very hard
What links the following sets:
Tawhid, Asian Tigers, Worthies, Chalcogens, funnier than 24?
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The answer to this puzzle is:
Square numbers: Tawhid is the “oneness” of God, there are 4 Asian Tigers, 9 Worthies, Chalcogens are group 16, and – for those young enough to have grown up watching SpongeBob – 25 is funnier than 24
Fiendish
What links the following sets:
Casement, David Jones, Stirling's (more-or-less), asterism, dog's bollocks?
All puzzles set by Felix Roberts from the Imperial Quiz Society.
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The answer to this puzzle is:
Punctuation: Roger Casement was “hanged on a comma”, David Jones wrote In Parenthesis, the factorial ! can be approximated using Stirling’s formula, an asterism is three asterisks, and the ‘dog’s bollocks’ is an outdated piece of typography made of a colon and dash
How to enter:
The first 10 readers to send the correct solutions for two or more of the puzzles will be entered into a prize draw to win a book e-voucher for the value of £10.
Winners' names will be in Imperial 53 in December 2022, and solutions published on this page.
To enter, please email imperialmagazine@imperial.ac.uk.
Entries close on 31 August 2022.
Congratulations to everyone who found the correct solutions and well done to our winning puzzlers:
- Fergus Dignan (MBBS Westminster Medical School 1979)
- Adrian Tottenham (MSc Chemical Engineering 1981)
- Jon Tyrell (BSc Mathematics 1974)
- Joe White (MSci Chemistry 2021)
- Katherine Papakyriacou (MEng Aeronautical Engineering 2021)
- Kevin Ridout (Civil Engineering 1979)
- Ian Pawson (PhD Mathematics 2002)
- Richard Smith (Chemistry 1964, PhD 1967)
- Chris Glover (Chemical Engineering 1974)
- Alan Green (Environmental Studies 1988)