Can You Solve the Age of This Dead Mathematician?
Here at PopMech, we love mind-bending math and logic puzzles, which is why we regularly recruit the sharpest minds in the world to concoct riddles that will test your critical thinking, mathematics, and logic skills. The following riddle is one particularly punishing problem—so go grab a pencil and a piece of scratch paper and prepare to rip your hair out (in the best way). No cheating!
➡ The Problem
One of the titans of Number Theory—the study of natural numbers and their properties—is Diophantus of Alexandria, an ancient Greek mathematician who still pops up in algebra textbooks today. You might even remember his namesake Diophantine equations, which always take the form Ax + By = C, where A, B, and C are all whole numbers.
Centuries after Diophantus’s death, the grammarian Metrodorus wrote an epitaph that both described the mathematician’s life and revealed his age—evidently a long-standing mystery. And that’s where you come in: Can you figure out how old Diophantus was when he died? (Bonus points if you can solve this problem without resorting to fractions.)
‘Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold.
Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:
'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,
One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;
And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;
In five years there came a bouncing new son.
Alas, the dear child of master and sage
After attaining half the measure of his father's age—chill fate took him.
After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four more years, he reached his end.'
➡ The Hint
Each of the moments described are self-contained and sequential. While I might not describe a period of my life as “whiskers time,” I’m also not an ancient poet!
➡ The Solution
Ready for the solution? Click here to see if you’re right—and to get an incredibly in-depth breakdown of how to solve this problem, plus the complete answers to almost 100 other challenging riddles.
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