Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Secrets of a Magical Number

Six puzzles, all with the same goal: Make 24. Can you do it?

September 27, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

The incredible 24 is also a Tribonacci number.
Photographer: iStockphoto/Getty Images

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This is a very, very special edition of Conundrums. Why’s that, you ask? It’s the twenty-fourth edition. And 24 is a magical number.

First off, 24 is a factorial. That is, it’s the product of all the positive integers less than or equal to some number – in this case 4. Factorials are so cool that mathematicians typically denote them with an exclamation point (4! = 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 24). And they’re rare. Unless we significantly speed up our publication cycle, the next factorial-numbered Conundrum won’t be for years.