Registration is now open for the next contest!
Welcome to The Puzzler. Every week, there are 2 new puzzles related to my passion: math, logic, and thinking. The first puzzle will be The Puzzler Quik, meant for those who crave something fun-sized. The second puzzle will be The Puzzler Think, meant for those who love to ponder. The answers will be posted in next week’s column. Don’t forget to submit your answer for a potential shout-out in the next edition of the Puzzler.
Puzzler Quik
How many solutions are their to the equation $$x^3−7x^2+16x−12$$
Puzzled?
Try factoring this problem and making sure there are no double roots!
The answer is close to BUT NOT the degree of this equation(3).
Let a and b be the roots of $$x ^2 − 3x − 1 = 0.$$
Can you find the sum $$a+b.$$ As an extra challenge, try to not solve for a and b individually!
Puzzled?
The coefficients in the problem will help you!
Search up Vieta’s Formulas to get how to solve this problem!
ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S PUZZLERS
Last Week's Puzzler Quik
Abigail from Texas was the winner of this shout-out.
First of all, if you don’t know what a LCM is, just watch our video on it!
To find the LCM of 12, 16, and 20, we can find their prime factorization! $$12=2^2\cdot3$ $16= 2^4$ $20=2^2 \cdot 5$$
Now, like mentioned in the video, we can just read of the exponents to get our answer of $$240=2^4 \cdot 3 \cdot 5$$ This gives us our correct answer of 240!
Last Week's Puzzler Think
This week’s shout out goes to Abhi from Pennsylvania! Kudos to him!
It is important to note that the GCF of a number and it’s powers is just the number to the minimum power that appears! So, we just have to find the GCF of 2^1 and 3^1. This is simply just 1!
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