OUR FIRST GUEST PUZZLEMASTER IS RODERICK KIMBALL, the fiend behind Enigami. Roderick was born in BC, making him either ridiculously old, or simply Canadian. In his youth, Roderick was sometimes spotted on the slow end of a soccer pitch but more often on the fast end of a chess board. (Surely you’ve heard of the notorious Kimball maneuver, in which one opens a chess match by flipping the king’s pawn into the air such that it lands, butter side up, on the king’s fourth rank.) Roderick has created puzzles for the National Museum of Mathematics, Games Magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, NPR’s Ask Me Another and for his own amusement. In the other half of his life, Roderick has toured the world juggling with the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He also recently returned from Kenya, where he was sent by Engineers Without Borders to help folks with improving their water supply. He is proud to say that his ancestry includes two very great grandmothers who were executed as witches and he once made bottled water come out Rosie O’Donnell’s nose.
Arrange the numbers 1 through 9 in the grid so that all of the conditions in the puzzle are satisfied. Every number is used once. The rules are
- The number in the lower left corner is 4 times the number in the upper right corner.
- The 9 is between the 5 and the 8. (on a straight line)
- There is a column in which the sum is equal to the product.
- The 4 is between the 9 and the 3. (on a straight line)
- No prime number is immediately to the left of a prime number.