Blog Post #177: Special Surprise for Wonderful Wout!! 💗😊

Dear All,

Among my favourite Bible verses is Jeremiah 17:7-“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him.”

One of the most precious gifts that God has given us is time, right now, in the present. Sometimes we shouldn’t wait 52 weeks or even 52 days to do something special for others…

I have been thinking a lot about dozens of wonderful students whom I’ve had the great privilege of working with in my 8 years as a Mathematics teacher at Musica Mundi School, since the founding of the school in 2018 by Leonid Kerbel & Hagit Hassid-Kerbel 💗😊.

Wonderful Wout Callens is exceptionally gifted at Mathematics.
Wout’s birthday is coming in 52 days from now (on 21 April), but today I thought of a special, personal brainteaser in honour of Wout, and I decided to post & share it here, without delay 💗😊.

The shape is not drawn to scale. However, suppose that (in honour of Wout Callens’ birthday on 21 April) the length of WC is exactly 21.4 cm. CU has the same length.

Angle TWU is one of the right angles indicated clearly in the picture.

You are now also given that OW is an exact whole number of millimetres, and is just a very short length, somewhere between half a centimetre and one centimetre.

WT, though, is actually an extremely large whole number of millimetres in length.

The early birthday brainteaser challenge in honour of Wonderful Wout is to figure out the exact lengths of OW and WT.

Really honestly, this special brainteaser can be solved within a few minutes, without even needing to use any calculator, AI or anything of that sort!

If you love Mathematics like Wout does, then I wish you great enjoyment and success in tackling and solving the brainteaser 👍😊.

Some time ago, a gentleman named Ron Adams wrote to me regarding the Fort Knox Variation of the French Defence in Chess. I’m including here a link to quite a helpful Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Defence that I hope may be useful to Ron and other keen chess players 🥰.

I’m also including a link to one of my absolute favourite pieces of James Bond music, ‘Dawn Raid on Fort Knox’ from Goldfinger, by Oscar winner John Barry 🎼🎶🎧😍.