February puzzle answers

Lots of Math Mania winners in February

Eleven of you answered all the February Math Mania "magic square" problems correctly. That's a good showing for questions you were seeing for the first time.

Also, the timing of your entries was much better than in January. You'll remember that quite a few of the January entries weren't judged because they were postmarked after the January 15 deadline.

None of the February entries were late.

Since we had a large number of all-correct entries, Young Saint Louis.com decided to again award four, rather than only three, $10 Borders gift certificates. The four were selected randomly from among the 11 all-correct entries.

Winners in February were:

Varun Chakravarthy of Clayton, Gray Harlan of St. Louis, Tim Hu of Clayton and Caroline Wiley of St. Louis.

For March, Ms. Math Mania, Amy Ruzicka of St. Gabriel's School, has decided to quiz you on your understanding of the "order of operations" that go into effect when trying to figure out complicated equations.

The "order of operations" was developed by mathematicians years ago so people can travel the same path to the right answer. (If people use different "orders of operations," they can get different answers even though their individual computations are correct.)

The see the March questions and enter the monthly contest, click here.

Congratulations to all who got all those who got the February puzzles correct.

Answers to the February Math Mania Challenge: