Dear Readers,
All of the students at Musica Mundi School are super-gifted young musicians who develop their talents even further, thanks to their dedication, daily hard work, and of course lots of really top-class Music teaching that they receive at the school.
Naturally, Music is a top-priority subject and passion in the lives of all the students.
For me, it’s also very nice that some of the young stars are quite keenly interested in Mathematics, too! One such star is Cansu, a Turkish musician and A-level Maths student, who’s having one of her happiest-ever weekends after winning in Paris the 2nd Prize in the ‘18ème Concours International de Piano de Chatou’.
Many congratulations to Cansu!
Though I love and appreciate music, I have no expertise in that domain, but I would like to offer here two really fun number puzzles to celebrate Cansu’s super achievements!
As the letters C-A-N-S-U correspond to positions 3, 1, 14, 19 & 21 in the English alphabet, we’ve got the following nice pair of puzzles…
Puzzle #1
Cansu is a really high-class student in Music AND Maths, so let’s
use the numbers 3, 1, 14, 19 & 21 (in any order) to make the target number 2.
For clarification, we should use all the five numbers 3, 1, 14, 19 & 21 just once each in a calculation which leads to a result of 2.
We can use brackets ( ) and any operation symbols +, -, x, /
that we want, but try to make the calculation lead to the result of 2
using as few different operations as possible in the calculation.
Puzzle # 2
This is my Blog Post #96, so let’s
use the numbers 3, 1, 14, 19 & 21 (in any order) to make the new target number 96.
For clarification, we should use all the five numbers 3, 1, 14, 19 & 21 just once each in a calculation which leads to a result of 96.
We can use brackets ( ) and any operation symbols +, -, x, /
that we want, but try to make the calculation lead to the result of 96
using as few different operations as possible in the calculation.
The two puzzles can be enjoyed by everyone who’d like to try them.
I’m counting them as prize puzzles for all of my personal students, and of course for Cansu and anyone at Musica Mundi School who’d like to join in this good fun! Solving either one or both of the puzzles (or simply enjoying trying them) would be excellent.
Solutions will (God-willing as always) be published at the time of the next blog post, or possibly even sooner.
Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend now,
Paul Motwani xxx
Puzzle Solutions (being posted now on 28.2.2021)
Congratulations to everyone who found good solutions!
There were numerous possibilities, including
1 x 3 x 14 – 21 – 19 = 2
&
1 x 3 x 21 + 14 + 19 = 96.
Paul Motwani 