You Can Make 200K A Year Working For The British Government If You Can Solve This Math Puzzle!
Sounds too good to be true …
Apparently the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is looking to hire freethinking innovators, weirdos and misfits to redesign the British government.
One could potentially earn up to £200,000 a year if they pass through a highly selective process.
As Pat McFadden said: “You might remember a few years ago, there was a call for weirdos and misfits in the system. Well, whatever term you want to use, we do want innovators and disrupters and original thinkers.”
Part of the sifting process is aimed at people with ‘exceptional math(s) and reasoning skills’. So I guess me and the readers of Math Games are entitled to £200,000 a year now? LOL!
This puzzle is an invitation for some of our best minds from academia and business to apply their brainpower to some of the most pressing challenges of our time, from waiting lists to prison reform. — McFadden
So can you solve Downing Street’s Geometry Puzzle? As usual, grab your pen and paper and give this a go, when you are ready, you will find out if you too, deserve the grand prize of £200,000 a year!
Solution
We start by drawing one orange triangle and one blue triangle that connect to the red triangle. In fact, doing so gives us a bigger triangle composed of the 3.
So our strategy is to find the area of the red triangle by subtracting the orange and blue triangles from the big triangle.
The area of a square is found by squaring its side length. Knowing this we an reverse engineer and find the side length of each square.
Specifically the 2 small squares on the bottom have side length of √5.
The large square at the top has side length 6√𝜋.
As for the medium square in the middle, we see that its side is equal to the side of two small squares, so we get its side length as 2√5.
Here we’ve labelled the base and height of the orange triangle and the blue triangle. Subsequently, that also gives us the base and height of the overall triangle.
Hopefully you remember the area of a triangle is 1/2(b)(h).
So putting everything together, we get this formula with lots of radicals. Fortunately for us, it turns out the answer comes to to a neat integer 10.
Wait this blog post hasn’t ended. Please take a look at the excerpts and the very insightful and critical comments from readers on Financial Times.
You get to read my commentaries on their comments as well! On y va :)
Excerpts from Financial Times
Comments on the Article
Indeed the puzzle here is fun but pointless when it comes to the real world. It’s nothing but a little brain workout for anyone who knows basic geometry.
Of course almost all universities in the UK are an echo-chamber with no original thought. They train students to regurgitate information and pander to the authorities. Any critical thought will be silenced. There’s not much freedom of speech or thought in the UK, let alone any innovators or disrupters.
That’s whay I have been saying all along. This is not only true for these geometry puzzles, but also true for the majority of undergraduate mathematics courses. Even if a person aces uni-level courses in statistics, machine learning and whatnot, it correlates little to their ability to work in the government.
That’s my humble 2 cents.
Yes the government should offer me a role please! If anyone works for the government, please give me a referral :)
Just so you know, I would be more than happy with a £80k salary.
It’s a joke, of course.
So I actually uploaded the puzzle to ChatGPT and it got the puzzle wrong on its first try.
I guess I deserve a £200k more than ChatGPT :)
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Barry — Online Maths tutor
40£/h : I offer tutoring in the following: GCSE Maths & Further Maths (All Exam Boards) A Level Maths & Further Maths…www.superprof.co.uk
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