As you may recall, around this time last year, I ran two puzzles by high school students who were winners of the Regeneron Science Talent Search. This year, I am delighted to have puzzles from two of this year’s winners as well.
Luke Robitaille is from Euless, Texas. As part of his research project, he proved that most simple braids — topological structures composed on intertwining strands — are orderly for low numbers of strands. But as the number of strands increases, nearly all simple braids become chaotic. Luke also represented the United States three times in the International Math Olympiad, taking home three gold medals.
Now, I can’t recall ever running a straight-up word puzzle in my days as the editor of The Riddler. But Luke’s puzzle was too good to pass up, so here goes:
Find a word in the English language to which you can add a vowel, resulting in another word that has fewer syllables.
By “add a vowel,” I mean insert one additional letter — a vowel — somewhere in the word (or at the beginning or end), while keeping the ordering of all the other letters the same. For example, you could add a vowel to the word “TASTY” to get the word “TOASTY.” However, both words are two syllables, meaning this is not the solution.