The regular monthly meeting of Portsmouth MathsJam was held, as usual, at the King Street Tavern in Southsea. There was a welcome return for Andy, who has recently moved back to the region, and there were eight MathsJammers in total.

Most of the evening was spent trying various puzzles from a collection called Brain Busters that Jack had brought along. The puzzles were created by Ed Pegg Jr and you can find a pdf of them all at http://www.mathpuzzle.com/BrainBustersFinal.pdf

(We very much recommend Ed Pegg Jr’s site http://www.mathpuzzle.com. It has a huge collection of maths-related puzzles and links.)

Our own Edd posed this puzzle: consider two triangles with side lengths 5, 5, 6 and 5, 5, 8 respectively. What is the ratio of their areas? Before you go digging up your old book of trigonometric formulas, there is a simple way to find the solution.

Finally, we also enjoyed seeing the photos of other MathsJammers constructing cubes for the MegaMenger project. See http://megamenger.com for more information, or search @megamenger or #megamenger on Twitter for many pictures.