While using Google to scour the Internet for poems on arithmetic and algebra, I came across the following three limericks. The first is similar in spirit to the Carroll's poem and the next two are similar to Diophantus puzzle in my earlier posts.
Leigh Mercer, a noted British wordplay, wrote the following (excerpt from Word Ways, 1980, pp. 36):
A dozen, a gross, and a score Plus three times the square root of four Divided by seven Plus five times eleven Is nine squared and not a bit more.
Interestingly, Google's omnipotent search engine can "solve" this limerick automatically by entering the following slightly modified verse into the Google search bar:
(a dozen, and a gross, and a score plus three times the square root of four) divided by seven plus five times eleven
The following two are by David Pleacher, a retired mathematician:
Said a certain young lady named Gwen
of her tally of smitten young men,
"One less and three more
Divided by four
Together give one more than ten."
How many boyfriends had she? Answer here.
Some freshmen from Trinity Hall
Played hockey with a wonderful ball;
They found that two times its weight,
Plus weight squared, minus eight,
Gave "nothing" in ounces at all.
What was the weight of the ball? Answer here.
Diophantus was a Greek mathematician whose work laid down important foundation for the development of algebra. Listed on Wikipedia is an interesting puzzle to guess the age of Diophantus:
- 'Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold.
- Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:
- 'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,
- One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;
- And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;
- In five years there came a bouncing new son.
- Alas, the dear child of master and sage
- After attaining half the measure of his father's life chill fate took him.
- After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four years, he ended his life.'
This Diophantus puzzle has a similar flavor to the Carroll's puzzle in my previous post. Here, however, a finite sequence of moves (in fact, events in the timeline) is applied to an unknown - Diophantus's age.
How long did Diophantus live?
