I have been interested in solving, creating and curating math puzzles since high school. This tendency has helped me crack competitive exams, clear job interviews and make friends with loads of interesting people. Starting in high school, I began compiling a collection of my favourite problems and gave it the tongue-in-cheek title “Irodov ka Baap”.

Some background here for readers who don’t know - “Problems in General Physics” by I.E. Irodov was a book that nerdy Indian teenagers venerated, feared and adored. It was one of the classic preparation resources for the IIT JEE (An annual entrance exam which is the gateway to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology) and every serious aspirant proudly owned a copy that was dog-eared and worn out from frequent use (I used the past tense because things have probably changed since I gave the exam).

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My personal copy looked _much_ more beaten up

In Hindi, the literal meaning of the phrase “X ka baap” is “X’s father”, and colloquially it is used to denote something far superior to X. Hence the title “Irodov Ka Baap” was my way of claiming that my (yet to be written) book was far superior to a book beloved by several generations of my country’s most brilliant students. To answer your question, yes, 18 year old me was an insufferable prick with delusions of grandeur.

I actually took IKB further along than most of my projects - I even managed to sell an early draft for Rs. 50k! Over the years, the contents changed to reflect my changing tastes - The physics puzzles got swapped out with probability and discrete math but like the Ship of Theseus, I retained the name of my beloved collection. Unfortunately, I was never able to publish - The act of writing my thoughts down in a satisfactory way proved to be surprisingly hard. As time went on, my core interest in puzzles started waning. My puzzle friends were re-directing their mental bandwidth towards excelling in their careers, or having babies or going insane. My own mental bandwidth proved insufficient for such lofty goals, and was exhausted in trying to unentangle the tedious, bureaucratic mazes adults are required to run through.

Recently however, life came full circle for me. In the course of helping some high schoolers prepare for the AMC, I revisited the old neural pathways and rediscovered the dormant joy of puzzle solving. I decided to make use of this momentum to write down some of my favourite puzzles for the internet audience. The hope is to post a new puzzle each day for as long as I can. Links to all the problems will be aggregated below.

The solution for the previous days puzzle will be posted alongwith the puzzle for the next day.

P.S. A small fraction of you reading this are probably saying “BTW Irodov ka baap already exists, it’s called Aptitude Test Problems in Physics by SS Krotov”. To you I say, well done my friend! I doubt any one else in your life gave a fuck when you told them you had read and solved Krotov (No one did in mine) but today you got to feel smug for a few seconds and isn’t that what life is all about?