David Breyer Singmaster was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. He had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which quickly became the standard.
The World Puzzle Championship is an annual international puzzle competition run by the World Puzzle Federation. All the puzzles in the competition are pure-logic problems based on simple principles, designed to be playable regardless of language or culture.
Sean Parker is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and was the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement. He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. On the Forbes 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School is a children's novel by Louis Sachar in the Wayside School series. The book contains mathematical and logic puzzles for the reader to solve, presented as what The New Yorker called "absurdist math problems." The problems are interspersed with characteristically quirky stories about the students at Wayside School.
Scribd Inc. is a digital content subscription service providing access to a large collection of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and other written and spoken content. The company operates three main platforms Everand, Scribd and SlideShare.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Edmodo was an educational technology platform for K–12 schools and teachers. Edmodo enabled teachers to share content, distribute quizzes and assignments, and manage communication with students, colleagues, and parents. It was shut down on September 22, 2022.
ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy is a digital education program for children ages 2–8, created by the edtech company Age of Learning, Inc. The program offers educational games, videos, puzzles, printables, and a library of regular and “read-aloud” children’s books, covering subjects including reading and language arts, math, science, health, social studies, music, and art.
Alexander Bellos is a British writer, broadcaster and mathematics communicator. He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in The Guardian newspaper.
Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math is a series of five games released in 2011/2012 for the Wii, and is part of the Carmen Sandiego franchise. The style of the games are reminiscent of comic books. The 5-part series were the first English language console games from the Carmen Sandiego franchise since The Secret of the Stolen Drums. These "short, educational detective adventures" were only available as a download through the Nintendo Wii Shop. The games were developed by Gamelion Studios, and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They could take up to 6 players, and required 600 Wii points. Maths topics included in the games include: Symmetry, Identifying angles, Graphing coordinates on a grid, Logic puzzles, Working with fractions, Solving equations, and Tangrams. The games are designed for elementary learners across grades 3–5.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, engineer, SPAC sponsor, founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook, working at the company from 2007 to 2011. Following his departure from Facebook, Palihapitiya started The Social+Capital Partnership, through which he invested in several companies, including Yammer and Slack. He is a co-host of a technology podcast, All In, along with David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg.
Peg + Cat is an animated children's television series based on the children's picture book "The Chicken Problem", which was published in 2012. The series, which featured the voice acting of Hayley Faith Negrin and Dwayne Hill, was created by Billy Aronson and Jennifer Oxley and produced by Fred Rogers Productions and 9 Story Media Group. It debuted on most PBS stations on October 7, 2013, as part of the revamped PBS Kids brand, and aired 63 episodes through April 23, 2018. In Canada the show is broadcast on Treehouse TV.
SoFi Technologies, Inc. is an American online personal finance company and online bank. Based in San Francisco, SoFi provides financial products including student loan refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, credit card, investing, and banking through both mobile app and desktop interfaces.
Cicada 3301 is the name given to three sets of puzzles posted under the name "3301" online between 2012 and 2014. The first puzzle started on January 4, 2012, on 4chan and ran for nearly a month. A second round of puzzles began one year later on January 4, 2013, and then a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January 4, 2014. The third puzzle has been solved. The stated intent was to recruit "intelligent individuals" by presenting a series of puzzles to be solved; no new puzzles were published on January 4, 2015. A new clue was posted on Twitter on January 5, 2016. Cicada 3301 posted their last verified OpenPGP-signed message in April 2017, denying the validity of any unsigned puzzle.
This is a timeline of Airbnb, a company that brokers private lodging rentals through its website.
Social Capital, formerly known as Social+Capital Partnership, is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The firm specializes in technology startups, providing seed funding, venture capital, and private equity.
Futility Closet is a blog, podcast, and database started in 2005 by editorial manager and publishing journalist Greg Ross. As of February 2021 the database totaled over 11,000 items. They range over the fields of history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and recreational mathematics.
Sue Khim is an American education entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and current CEO of Brilliant.org, an educational platform and online community that features problems and courses in mathematics, physics, quantitative finance, and computer science. She also co-founded edtech start-up Alltuition, which helped students find low-cost college loans and assisted with financial aid forms. In 2012, she was named one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 in education.
Gary Antonick is an American journalist and recreational mathematician who for many years wrote a puzzle-based column called "Numberplay" for the New York Times.
