Brain-flexing Balance Problems & Other Puzzles

Book excerpt: Puzzles in perpetual motion—that’s what these are! Many of these bright brainteasers focus on ingenious, moving mechanisms, including an ancient Greek door-opening apparatus that featured one of the earliest uses of steam. Check out a perpetuum mobile invented by a famous American mathematician and see if you can successfully explain its theoretical principle of operation. A cartoon depicts a classic Lewis Carroll conundrum: there’s a monkey hanging on a tree holding one end of a rope while a bunch of bananas balance the other end in a state of equilibrium. What will happen if the monkey starts to climb? Other problems deal with gears and levers, while still more shift to number, counting, and calculation challenges.