As soon as I woke up this morning, I lazily reached for my phone. It's a habit. Every morning I wondered who left me a message when I was asleep.
Buried in this pile of e-mail notifications from Facebook and stores such as Kohl's, Target, Express, et cetera, there's this comment left by Akai Avenue, a loyal follower of Teaching Garden, in the preceding blog post. She just wanted to share with me a "mathematics magic".
Now let me share the same with you all, ninos y ninas!
Either by hand or using a calculator, do the following:
Multiply: 259 X your age X 39
What did you get?
STOP. Don't scroll down yet. Give it some more thought. Why did it give you that answer? What do you think would your friend get?
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Interesting, right?
My answer was 434343. I've never been reminded of my age this way. Sort of humiliating! :D
I assumed right away that the product of 259 and 39 must be 10101, and I was right.
Observe:
10101 X 24 = 242424
10101 X 16 = 161616
10101 X 57 = 575757
Also observe that the sum of the digits of 10101 is 3. If you divide the former by the latter, you'll get 3,367, which can be factored into 13 and 259. The latter can be factored further into 7 and 37.
Therefore, 10101 = 3 X 7 X 13 X 37.
Seeing 7 and 13, which are both associated with the word "lucky", and knowing that 3 X 37 = 111, I thought there must be a better way to present this math magic.
Oh, I know! Said math magic could use a makeover. And here it comes:
Multiply your age by 111 and by lucky numbers 7 and 13.
Doesn't this new version sound more appealing?
Now time to get out of bed. :D
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