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MIT Libraries Puzzle Challenge
Released February 22, 2008; deadline was March 3, 2008. This puzzle is exactly what it looks like: a set of nine sudoku puzzles, where M, R, and sometimes 0 are allowed instead of some of the regular digits. The first step is to solve the sudokus; the solved grid looks like this:
Notice that each grayed string has the form MRxxxxxxx, and each digit or pair of digits denoted by corner markings (light slashes above) is between 1 and 26. Converting each of these numbers to the corresponding letter of the alphabet (1=A, 2=B, etc.) and reading across each "line" (that is, each set of three rows in the sudokus) spells out: MATH This tells you what resource to use for these MR numbers: MathSciNet. MathSciNet is a carefully maintained and easily searchable database covering much of the mathematical sciences literature from 1940 to the present. This database contains not only bibliographic information for these papers, but also a review of each paper by another mathematician. The American Mathematical Society maintains and distributes MathSciNet. Each entry in MathSciNet is assigned a unique number of the format MRxxxxxxx, and it is this number that the grayed string corresponds to. In MathSciNet, you can search for the paper with this number by changing the search option to "MR number." As the text implies, the important piece of information in each record is the reviewer's name. Those names are:
To cross these names, we'd need to find a letter in each that is the same to cross them at. Fortunately, each pair of names only has one letter in common. Taking that letter and reading each row from left to right, we spell out the answer, Niels Bohr.
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