I’ve been enjoying the New York Times Connections game. It is a word game with simple instructions: “Find groups of four items that have something in common.” That is, you want to group the 16 given words into four groups of four, with each group sharing some trait. Examples they give are:

FISH: bass, salmon, flounder, trout
FIRE ____: ant, drill, island, opal

The words in the puzzle often have several meanings and can sometimes be grouped in multiple ways, although they can be grouped in four groups of four in only one way. It occurred to me that many mathematical terms mean different things within mathematics, or they have both mathematical and nonmathematical meanings—and thus possibly good Connections words. So I decided to create a couple Connections puzzles containing mathematical words. Here are two of them. Although the puzzle has math terms, the groupings may or may not be mathematical.

I’ve added links to the answers below the puzzles. I had a hard time calibrating the difficulty level of the puzzles. I hope they are a little challenging but not unsolvable. Have fun!

Here are the solutions for first puzzle.

Here are the solutions for second puzzle.