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Solution to July 13 Newsletter Puzzle

You may recall in the July 13 newsletter. I challenged my readers with the following puzzle. I said partial credit for solving for the pineapple and full credit for solving the full integral.

Integral

Let’s do the easy part first and solve for the fruits. To make it easy on me, let:

  1. a = apple
  2. l =lemon
  3. b = banana
  4. o = orange
  5. p = pineapple
 

We’re given:

  1. a + a + a = 6
  2. 3a = 6
  3. a = 2
  4. 1 + a = l
  5. 1 + 2 = l
  6. l = 3
  7. a + l = b
  8. 2 + 3 = b
  9. b = 5
  10. b + b + b = o
  11. 3b = o
  12. 3 * 5 = o
  13. o = 15
  14. al ÷ a × ( a + a ) – o = p
  15. 23 ÷ 2 × ( 2 + 2 ) – 15 = p
  16. 23 ÷ 2 × 4 – 15 = p
  17. 8 ÷ 2 × 4 – 15 = p
  18. 4 × 4 – 15 = p Remember from the 7/13/23 newsletter that when division and multiplication both appear in an expression, do the one on the left first.
  19. 16 – 15 = p
  20. So, the pineapple equals 1.
 

Next, let’s evaluate the integral.

Here we have:

  1. • The pie symbol represents the number π.
  2. • The eye symbol represents the imaginary number i (the square root of -1).
  3. • The cheese symbol can be anything. It’s the variable that we are integrating over. Let’s call it x.
 

Making those substitutions, we now need to evaluate:

Need to evaluate

From here I’m going to have to refer you to this PDF document on the solution from here, as the notation would be too difficult to put into HTML.

As you can see from that file, the answer is the square root of 2.

As I wrote in the July 13 newsletter, please post the image file of the original puzzle all over social media. I’m hoping it will become viral.

Written by: Michael Shackleford