NRICH on BBC R4's 'Puzzle for Today'

Keen-eared listeners to BBC Radio 4's flagship Today programme will have spotted that the new 'Puzzle for Today' slot features a collaboration with our NRICH project. NRICH's rich, engaging resources are designed to develop mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills. For the puzzles featured on Today, we have adapted selected NRICH problems which are carefully chosen to give rewarding opportunities for strategic thinking and reasoning, but are very accessible in terms of the mathematical knowledge and techniques required to tackle them, to appeal to the widest possible audience. The 'Puzzle for Today' activities include edited extracts from some of the thousands of rich low-threshold high-ceiling NRICH problems, as well as adaptations of some of NRICH's extensive collection of short problems published in collaboration with the UKMT. You can try one of the featured NRICH/UKMT puzzles below - the solution can be found on the Today website: In the Footprints Cafe each table has three legs, each chair has four legs and all the customers and the three members of staff have two legs each. There are four chairs at each table. At 5pm, three-quarters of the chairs are occupied by customers and there are 206 legs altogether in the cafe. How many chairs does the cafe have?