Here's a poser from Henry Dudeney:
"There were two families living next door to one another at Tooting Bec—the Jupps and the Simkins. The united ages of the four Jupps amounted to one hundred years, and the united ages of the Simkins also amounted to the same. It was found in the case of each family that the sum obtained by adding the squares of each of the children's ages to the square of the mother's age equalled the square of the father's age. In the case of the Jupps, however, Julia was one year older than her brother Joe, whereas Sophy Simkin was two years older than her brother Sammy. What was the age of each of the eight individuals?"
I refuse to "brute force" the answer to this, so the initial math has been sitting on my white board quite a while. It'll be there for a bit more since work is pretty busy.
ReplyDeleteI tried to muscle my way through it the first time I attempted a solution, but I screwed it all up. Dudeny's stuff could be tricky. That's why I put this one up. Sometimes the ones you miss are more interesting.
ReplyDelete