MGWCC crossword 2:30ish
meta 5ish 
[4.43 avg; 7 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #920 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 3 guest puzzle from Mike Graczyk, aka MikeyG, called “We’ve Got a Problem”. in this week’s instructions, mike challenges us to look for an 8-letter word I sometimes associate with mathematics. what are the theme answers?
- {Complement, in degrees, of the measure of an exterior angle in a regular heptacontadigon} EIGHTY-FIVE. now that’s a word i’ve never seen before. i’m guessing/assuming it is a polygon with 72 sides; in that event, the exterior angle would be 360°/72 = 5°, so the complement is 85°.
- {Number of subsets of {M, A, T, H} that contain exactly 1, 2, or 3 elements} FOURTEEN. there are 2^4 = 16 total subsets because each of the four elements could be either included or excluded. one of them has 0 elements, one has all four, and the other 14 have either 1, 2, or 3 (there are 4, 6, and 4 such subsets, respectively).
- {Slope of the line tangent to the function f(x) = 4x + 9x^2 – 3x^3 at its point of inflection} THIRTEEN. okay, this one is less elegant, but let’s go: the slope of the tangent line is given by the derivative of the function evaluated at that point. the inflection point is where the second derivative is zero. the first derivative is f'(x) = 4 + 18x – 9x^2, and the second derivative is f”(x) = 18 – 18x. from the second derivative, we can see that the inflection point is at x=1, and plugging x=1 into the first derivative gives f'(1) = 4+18-9 = 13.
- {One more than the sum of the first seven triangular numbers} EIGHTY-FIVE. surprise, it’s 85 again! and why not? the first seven triangular numbers are 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, and 28 (= 1+2+3+4+5+6+7, with the first six triangular numbers calculated similarly), and they do indeed add up to 84.
i could probably have solved this quite a bit faster if i’d noticed the final across clue: {Steak sauce that’s also a hint to the meta (don’t make a missed steak)} A-ONE. but i did get there in the end: just take each digit of each answer and convert it into a letter using A=1, B=2, etc. sure, you can only get the letters from A to I that way, but those are the only ones you need to spell HEADACHE, the meta answer, which has the digits 85141385, respectively.
there’s a lot of math in the theme clues, but fortunately, you don’t need to do any math. (in particular, you don’t need to know calculus to answer the third themer.) you can just get the answers from crossing letters. i found the grid difficult to fill, even for a smaller (15×11) grid, because mike’s cluing style is so punny. most of the clues in this puzzle would not be out of place in a puns & anagrams puzzle, but in a standard crossword, they are… well, nonstandard. right off the bat, we have {Said one angel to another, “Well, ___ there!”} HALO, which breaks all kinds of rules of crossword cluing. nothing about this clue involves the definition of HALO. you can do that for a theme answer if that’s the theme of the puzzle, but here it was just incidental fill. and there were many such clues!
(note that the actual theme also broke one of the standard rules of crossword construction, which is to not repeat answers in the grid. but there was a good thematic reason for the violation, which is that the bigram HE appears twice in the answer HEADACHE. that’s fun and interesting, and i never have any beef with a theme that breaks the rules.)
now, i have to say, the puzzle was certainly solvable. it just required a mindset shift from how i normally approach crosswords—solving by vibes and word association rather than actual meanings of the words. i ended up enjoying it—but it was jarring, like if you went to the library and discovered that the librarians had been replaced by stand-up comedians.
how’d you all find this week’s?
“i ended up enjoying it—but it was jarring, like if you went to the library and discovered that the librarians had been replaced by stand-up comedians.”
This is great, haha. Thanks for your commentary on these!
I wrote this one a couple of years ago (I don’t have too many metas in the till, but this one was) and can’t remember how it began. Maybe just wondering if there was any word using only the letters A-I (1-9) that would make for a fun reveal. I stumbled upon the eventual answer to this one, chuckled, and said, “Well, sometimes metas do give me those!” In a good way, of course! (I am a math teacher and really do love math, but some problems out there are absolutely brutal at times!)
The premise of this one was a little tongue-in-cheek, in the sense that little-to-no math is really needed to get the meta, especially if you get the four numbers just from the crossings. (I needed to make sure to include my love of calculus at 34-A – and even I learned a new word while researching what a 72-sided figure would be called, if even such a name existed!).
It’s kind of something I emphasize with my students: “Sometimes, there’s an easier way to approach the problem than what you’re thinking.” Often, after seeing how something is done, they’ll ask incredulously, “That’s it? That’s all I had to do?”
Yes! That applies to crosswords also. I have lost count of how many times when solving a meta I’ll see what the actual path is and chuckle at how overly complicated I tried to make it.
I would’ve perhaps tried to create a title that nodded to the mechanism, in retrospect, but I figured the AONE clue was sufficient without giving too much of the game away. I was worried the hint there was not overt enough but was assuaged by the influx of solvers early on.
Hope this (and all the silliness) didn’t give you too much of a HEADACHE! Keep on puzzling!
Mikey G
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
I love math and puns!
I DON’T love math, but do like puns, so I enjoyed solving the grid a lot more than the meta, which, so surprise, I totally whiffed on.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Fun puzzle. I enjoyed the quirky style of it.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
Fun puzzle! It was nice to get back into the win column after whiffing on last week’s. I’ve done a bunch of Mikey’s puzzles, so the punny clues didn’t feel out of place, just characteristic of his style. Also a math teacher (retired) but I didn’t really do the problems, just used the crossings. I did check the second and fourth themers, just to see if I could figure them out correctly.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Got this one right off, without doing the math (which I love) and without catching the A-ONE hint. I’m with Joon in that the first couple puns threw me off kilter, but once I saw ’em coming it was fun, I enjoyed the novelty. And can’t help but wonder if Mikey G. is so punny in person, and if so, how often he gets beat up by the other kids…;-)
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
Same. Forgot the last across answer and just noted: 4 themes and 8 letters in the meta and thought, there are 8 integers there. Took me 5 minutes. I felt all along Mikey was trolling us with the mathy clues. Well done, and thanks, Mikey!