World renowned mathematician Richard Hamilton has recognised the works of Chinese mathematicians on giving a complete proof of the century-old puzzle of Poincare Conjecture, reports People’s Daily. “Chinese mathematicians have played a very important part in this development,” Prof Hamilton at Princeton University said in a video talk recorded two weeks ago in Beijing when he discussed the proof with Prof Cao Huaidong, an investigator who had unravelled the conjecture. “It’s very nice to have such an account written by two outstanding people in the field of Ricci flow. They also introduced ideas of their own which makes the proof easier to understand,” Prof Hamilton said in the video that for the first time went to public at the ongoing International Conference on String Theory 2006.

PUZZLE 1: When this year’s Girl Scout cookie sale ended, Heidi and four other scouts topped the local sales charts in terms of the number of boxes sold. Each of the five sales leaders, no two of whom sold the same number of boxes, is from a different troop in a different area of the town. Given the sales figures below, can you determine how many boxes each Girl Scout sold, her full name, the troop to which she belongs, and the town where the troop meets?

Marie sold twice as many boxes of Girl Scout cookies as the Valdez girl, who sold 50 more boxes than the member of Troop 1066.

The Updike girl sold 100 more boxes of cookies than Kristin, who isn’t the best-selling scout from Summerset.

The Turner girl’s favourite cookies are Samoas, while the girl from Churchville loves Tagalongs and the girl in Troop 325 chooses the new Double Dutch cookies over the others.

The girl who belongs to Troop 197 sold 100 more boxes than the scout from troop 711.

The Sanders girl sold 100 fewer boxes than the scout who belongs to the Fallston troop, the Fallston girl sold half as many boxes as Lisa did.

Jana, who isn’t in the Churchville troop, and the scout from Troop 1066 both sold cookies outside local Giant food stores.

The girl from the Glenview troop, which isn’t Troop 418, didn’t sell the most cookies.

The Walton girl and the scout from the Hillside troop, who isn’t Kristin, were also in the top 5 in sales for 2003.

The girl from the Summerset troop sold twice as many boxes as the top 5 sales scout who is in Troop 418.

The Turner girl isn’t in the Summerset troop.

The five combined to sell a total of 1,800 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, with the lowest number sold among the five being 150 boxes.

Solutions on July 31

CORRECT ENTRIES

July 3

Abhigyan Mundhra; Banasri Gupta, Finland; Kuntalesh Dewangan, Ranchi; Abhishek Ray; Debraj Datta, Salt Lake.

PUZZLE CRACKED

TThe response this week (July 3) was fine. Brainstormer Debraj Datta’s solution follows.

Solution: The full name of the characters along with the number and different desserts ordered by them is given below:

Elena Mischak ordered four desserts. These were chocolate ice cream, lemon cake, peach pie and vanilla ice cream.

Jacques Reed ordered three desserts. These were apricot pie, blueberry custard and peach pie.

Kiera Quist ordered two desserts. The desserts were chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream

Lloyd Farias ordered five desserts. These were apricot pie, blueberry custard, chocolate ice cream, lemon cake and vanilla ice cream

Theo 'Donnell ordered one dessert. It was a lemon cake.