If you know me, you know I LOVE puzzles and riddles. I’m a big escape room enthusiast. So I was delighted to find the following riddle in a book I was reading, which the author attributes the the mathematician Tartaglia! See if you can solve it! I left a hint…and then the solution.
THE RIDDLE: A man dies, leaving 17 camels to be divided among his three heirs, in the proportions 1/2, 1/3 and 1/9. How can this be done?
I had a lot of fun with this, trying to think of creative solutions. Just to be clear: we are not hurting any camels. That is, none of them are being cut up into fractional pieces.
As a HINT:
*SPOILER ALERT*
Something I noticed after playing around was that the sum of the fractions was almost, but not quite, equal to one whole. That is, 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/9 can be thought of as 9/18 + 6/18 + 2/18, which is equal to 17/18…not quite 1.
THE SOLUTION:
*SPOILER ALERT*
Are you sure you want to know it?
I’ll start from the hint…You may have noticed the fractions added up to 17 out of 18, and we have 17 camels…so imagine we borrow a camel for a moment. We now have 18 camels. We can then give away 1/2 (9 camels), 1/3 (6 camels), and 1/9 (2 camels) to the heirs. That’s a total of 17 camels. Every heir got their fraction, and we still have the borrowed camel that we can now return.
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