Solving This Math Problem Without Cheating Is Almost Impossible

In the past, we've had you go head-to-head with some challenging puzzles and sometimes, we've asked you to flex your math skills. Yet the super wizards among you may have noticed that those often didn't serve as a true test of math skills. This is because the answer usually involves a trick where you're kind of working around the numbers rather than facing them directly.

For those of you who feel this way, don't worry. Today, we've got you covered with a puzzle that even the biggest math purist will approve of. After all, it comes from the master of recreational math himself, writer Martin Gardner.

The rest of us might have a hard time believing that people actually do this for fun. Still, it's nice to give our brains a good challenge, so let's dive in and see what the master has in store for us.

SHARE this and let your friends know just how sharp you are.

First, let's learn a little about Martin Gardner.

He was an accomplished journalist, author, philosopher, and magician, but he was best known for his mathematical puzzles. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, he contributed a new one to Scientific American every month. Despite this, he actually claimed to have a hard time solving puzzles.

So now you know who to thank or shake your fist at, depending on how this goes.   

What he wants us to do is work out the following long division problem.

That eight up there isn't the answer, it's just one digit of the answer.

If you remember how long division works, this should be perfectly solvable.

Wait, wait, come back... I swear we can get through this. Some of us just need a little refresher, that's all.

You'll need to know that each row of Xs marked A is a multiple of the divisor.

Remember that the divisor is what we're dividing everything by, and we're trying to multiply it as much as we can. Of course, we don't know what the divisor is yet, but that doesn't matter as much as you might think.

For this step, all you need to know is we're multiplying the divisor as much as we can and then subtracting it from the dividend. The dividend's huge, so we need to do that in a couple of steps.

If you look at the rows of Xs marked B, you'll notice there's a couple of extra Xs.

If we're subtracting, how is the number we get even bigger? That's actually a clue.

After all, that tells us that we can put a zero right where those extra digits pop up.

Why? Because each of those zeroes marks where we've had to pull an X down because the multiple was too small, meaning the divisor went in zero times. 

From there, we're on our way to figuring out the last digit of the answer. What you need to know is that the number circled in red is the divisor times eight and that the number circled in green is what you get when you multiply the last digit of the answer with the divisor.

Again, notice how the number in green is a digit more than the one in red. This means the last digit of the quotient has to be higher than eight because we already know that eight times the divisor gives you a three-digit number.

Of course, that means it can only be nine.

Also, knowing that the number marked in blue is eight times the divisor kind of gives the divisor away too. We know it has to be less than 125 because 125 times eight equals 1,000, which is too big. 

But what about that pesky first number in the answer? Well, we know it can't be seven or less because 124 times 7 would equal 868 and would produce an answer larger than the two numbers marked in orange when subtracted.

And of course, we just figured out what happens when we try to multiply the divisor by nine.

Taking all that into account, the quotient has to be 80809.

Now we just need to figure out the divisor, which is super easy. After all, we already know it can't be higher than 125. Plus, if we multiply 123 by 80809, we get 9939507. This is a digit too short to be the dividend, so the divisor has to be 124.

From there, we just have to multiply 124 by 80809 to get a dividend of 10020316.

The rest is simply taking the number we already know is eight times the divisor and subtracting it from the dividend.

And that's how you solve this brain-twister of a math puzzle. Ta-da!

Don't forget to SHARE and tell your friends you knew the answer all along.

h/t The Guardian