It is claimed that Albert Einstein came up with this riddle when he was young and still living in his Native Germany in the late 1800s. The actual details may have changed over the years but the idea is always the same:

“- In a street there are five houses, painted five different colors.

- In each house lives a person of different nationality.

- These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.

The riddle is: Who owns the fish?”

To solve this you need these clues, some paper and a lot of spare time:

1. The British man lives in a red house.

2. The Swedish man keeps dogs as pets.

3. The Danish man drinks tea.

4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.

5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.

6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.

7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.

8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.

9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.

10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.

11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.

12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.

13. The German smokes Prince.

14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

15. The Blends smoker lives next to the one who drinks water.

If you can solve it then you are, according to Einstein, in the top 2% of intelligent people in the world.

[The answer can be found at the end of this post...no peeking now...]

In 1933 Einstein emigrated to the USA and settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study (other famous residents there include Von Neumann and Oppenheimer) until his death in 1955. The entrance to the Institute bears his name now (Einstein Drive) and if you drive down that road you will get to the institute itself:

Sadly this was as close as I dared get as, unlike Princeton University campus, the area is private and I’ve learned not to argue with those in positions of authority in the US.

Unfortunately during my visit Mercer Street was closed to traffic otherwise I would have been able to see Einstein’s old house, now a US National Historic Landmark:

Little did Einstein realize that over 50 years later people would still associate the word “House” with the Princeton campus. Today the Frist Building is used to portray the fictional Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in the TV series “House”:

Perhaps this link could form the basis for a new theory of relativity?....

[For those of you who want to check your solution, the answer to the riddle is: The coffee-drinking, Prince Cigar-smoking German in the green house owns the fish.]