Nine squares with side lengths 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15 and 18 cm are fitted together with no gaps and no overlaps, to form a rectangle.
What length are the sides of the rectangle?
Once you've had a chance to think about it, you may like to see how three different students began working on the task.
Comments
I came across this ...
Permalink Submitted by Nikki Rohlfing on Mon, 02/15/2016 - 21:14
I came across this only the other day, lovely website! I let my subconscious work on this the past 24 hours, and found the solution.
If you'd like to see some hints about the methods I used, click below:
Approach was finding total area, doing prime factors on that, and thinking about possible rectangles. Of the 3 possible ones which can even fit an 18x18 square, only 1 would actually leave enough space for others to also fit in.
Lovely little puzzle, thanks!
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