Post me your hardest maths question you know

I'm totally lost on the above :(

I prefer these types of questions:D

3 men are seated in a restaurant
They order a meal each.
After eating the meal they request the bill.
The waiter gives them the bill which equals £30.
After much squabling, the men decide to split the bill three ways (£10 each)
As the waiter is going back to the till, he realises there is a special on this week where three dine for £25 but as he cannot split £5 between three equally and as he wishes to avoid a further arguement with the men (and because they didn't tip!) he decides to keep £2 himself as a tip and gives the men £3 change (£1 each).

Now, if he gives them all £1 each change you don't need to be a math genius to realise they have therefore paid £9 each per meal.

3x9 = 27 (+2 the waiter kept as a tip)= 29

So where did the other pound go?
 
Kenai said:
Greater minds than anyone posting on this board have debated back and forth over this 0.9r=1 concept and never reached an agreed conclusion, it's not something that's going to be miraculously solved by an argument over whether 0.9r multiplied by 10 is 9 or 9.9r.
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agreed :D

But im still waiting for someone to give me the right answer to the question i set about travelling to america ;)
 
tntcoder said:
Time to claim the £1 million up for grabs!

Consider this example as opposed to the cup of tea:



Proving that at a generic level for the whole P/NP sets is where it gets mind boggling.
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Taken from the claymaths.org website

P vs NP Problem

"Suppose that you are organizing housing accommodations for a group of four hundred university students. Space is limited and only one hundred of the students will receive places in the dormitory. To complicate matters, the Dean has provided you with a list of pairs of incompatible students, and requested that no pair from this list appear in your final choice. This is an example of what computer scientists call an NP-problem, since it is easy to check if a given choice of one hundred students proposed by a coworker is satisfactory (i.e., no pair taken from your coworker's list also appears on the list from the Dean's office), however the task of generating such a list from scratch seems to be so hard as to be completely impractical. Indeed, the total number of ways of choosing one hundred students from the four hundred applicants is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe! Thus no future civilization could ever hope to build a supercomputer capable of solving the problem by brute force; that is, by checking every possible combination of 100 students. However, this apparent difficulty may only reflect the lack of ingenuity of your programmer. In fact, one of the outstanding problems in computer science is determining whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked, but which require an impossibly long time to solve by any direct procedure. Problems like the one listed above certainly seem to be of this kind, but so far no one has managed to prove that any of them really are so hard as they appear, i.e., that there really is no feasible way to generate an answer with the help of a computer. Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin formulated the P (i.e., easy to find) versus NP (i.e., easy to check) problem independently in 1971."

Surely the answer is how many duplicates of each student are there. There could be 400 students each paired once, or 400 students each paired 3 times. (this answer relates to the above question) In either case, the answer should be that N=NP as to verifiy this answer another person must go through the same list and tick off each person the list creator got correct? In regards to computing the answer, the computer must go through each pair once to get the answer, then once again to verify it taking the same time
 
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Kenai said:
Greater minds than anyone posting on this board have debated back and forth over this 0.9r=1 concept and never reached an agreed conclusion, it's not something that's going to be miraculously solved by an argument over whether 0.9r multiplied by 10 is 9 or 9.9r.
Click to expand...

but 0.9 X 9 = 8.1 or am i missing somethign :) therefore 0.9 X 10 = 9.0 therefore 0.9r = 9.9r as there will never be a +0.x1 on the end, especially with the 9r could be infinite or even if it did end your still missing that 0.x1
 
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w3bbo said:
..three dine for £25 but as he cannot split £5 between three equally and as he wishes to avoid a further arguement with the men (and because they didn't tip!) he decides to keep £2 himself as a tip and gives the men £3 change (£1 each).

Now, if he gives them all £1 each change you don't need to be a math genius to realise they have therefore paid £9 each per meal.

3x9 = 27 (+2 the waiter kept as a tip)= 29

So where did the other pound go?
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Am I missing something here???

£2 of the £27 is his tip, it's not in addition to £27 :confused:
 
jellybeard999 said:
Am I missing something here???

£2 of the £27 is his tip, it's not in addition to £27 :confused:
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That's the point, the question tries to lead you into somehow getting back to £30 when in reality the bill is now £25 and the £27 they have paid is due to the £25 bill and the 'tip' of £2, with the £30 figure being entirely irrelevant.

It's a puzzle based on misdirection and confusion rather than mathematics :p
 
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