Tuesday, July 26, 2011

123, abc

My eye fell on the Two Brains puzzle in Saturday’s Times – not something I usually spend any time on.

How many times does the letter A appear in the spelling of the numbers 1-100?

Is this a trick question?

No, the answer expected is ‘none’

Is it more or less interesting to ask how many times the letters a b or c occur in the same number set?

Or j k m p q z?

Given that our set of number words is quite parsimonious (though not as parsimonious as it could be) I don’t understand why this should be surprising. Depending on how you look at it there could be as few as 19 different words in this number set (28 if you include all the teens plus 60,70,80,90), depending on how you classify & count them.


Posted by at