[This is a back-issue of one of this site’s newsletters]
Last week, I emailed you a way to solve a simple math puzzle – how do you find a rectangle whose area equals its perimeter?
I took the puzzle, mixed in a little bit of algebra, and voila! A puzzle solution factory popped out, letting you generate rectangles from pythagorean triplets.
That’s all well and good if you happen to know a lot of pythagorean triplets (or know a formula for generating them – I’ll tell you one next week). If not, though, my solution isn’t all that useful.
So, this week, I’ve written up a simpler way to solve the same puzzle. Read about it here.
There’s always more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and there’s always more than one way to solve a math problem. And the simplest way isn’t always the first one you think of, nor is it always the one you might have learnt from your teachers!
Game Of The Week:
This past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting emails about my traffic jam game. One from a teacher who uses the game in class, and another from a parent whose 7 year old wanted a math games party! How awesome is that!
Can you get the red car out?