Dear Readers,
Sometimes I wish that I could personally give a nice present to everyone on their birthday! I do believe that all good and beautiful things will be possible in Heaven, where everything will be infinitely more special than any human mind can imagine now.
Since I try to never take the very precious gift of Time for granted, this particular blog post is coming two days early…before the birthday on Wednesday, 10 February, of Yngvild, the mother in a really nice Norwegian family I know.
When they previously lived in Belgium, I often had the great pleasure of doing Maths &/or Chess with Yngvild’s and Sigve’s three lovely children. They especially liked sneaky bonus surprises, and so let’s have one right now, in advance of Yngvild’s birthday!
- Start with 17, the number of characters in YNGVILD’S BIRTHDAY (including the apostrophe).
- Divide by 5 in honour of Yngvild, Sigve and their three delightful children.
- Multiply by my favourite number, 3.
The result of 10.2 is to celebrate Yngvild’s February 10 birthday!
All of Sigve and Yngvild’s children love counting mentally, and so here comes an extra puzzle that I’m sure they’ll solve pretty quickly…
Which one of the ten numbered bottles should be removed so that the total sum of the numbers on the remaining nine bottles will be exactly divisible by 10.2 ?
A solution is given at the end of the article.
Have you ever wondered how many different rearrangements are possible with the 8 letters in BIRTHDAY…!?
Well, you might enjoy figuring out why there’s actually 40320 possible arrangements.
As a neat bonus, 40320 also equals the number of minutes in the month of February (when it’s not a leap year)!
It’s time for me to sign off for now, this evening in Belgium, but I look forward hopefully to writing a 90th blog post soon…
In the meantime, keep well, happy and smiling, dear readers and friends!
With very best wishes as always,
Paul Motwani xxx
P.S.=PUZZLE SOLUTION!
The total of the numbers on the ten bottles is 55.
Noting that 5 x 10.2 = 51 helps us to discover that we should pick the number 4 bottle, since 55-4=51.
=the number of letters in LOVE.
Paul Motwani 