Foxtrot Solution for April 19th Comic
Posted by Thomas J. Brown at 0952 hrs
Today's Foxtrot comic contains a coded message and the key is hidden by a series of math problems. As the title implies, this post is about the solution to those problems, so if you want to figure them out for yourself, stop reading now.
At first, the problems look pretty complicated, but once I started looking at them, I quickly realized that many of them are simple problems. I was even able to do a number of them in my head! Morah and I busted out our calculators and filled in the key as best we could, which is below:
A - 11
B - 8
C -
D - 17
E - 10
F - 2
G - 5
H - 19
I - 13
J - 7
K - 26
L -
M - 22
N - 20
O - 15
P - 16
Q -
R - 9
S - 23
T - 12
U -
V - 25
W - 4
X - 18
Y - 21
Z - 14
As you can see, we left a few unsolved. Either they weren't coming out to whole numbers, or we simply didn't know how to solve those ones. Once we had the above figured out, we matched up the numbers with their respective letters and decoded the secret message:
Paige Fox is bad at math
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4 Comments
On 19 April 2009, Barry Leiba said:
Ah... so Thomas and Moira aren't good at trig functions. One should know the standard points, I guess.
C = 1 [sin(pi/2 = 1)]
L = 6 [I'm surprised you missed this one. Must have been an oversight. The X's cancel, and it's just 9 x 9 / 3]
Q = 24 [I've always hated integrals; too bad they're so important. The antiderivative of 9x**2 is g(x) = 3x**3 - 3. Now take g(2) - g(0).]
U = 3 [cos(pi) = -1]
On 19 April 2009, Barry Leiba said:
Sorry... Morah. I spelled the more common name by accident. I'm so embarrassed.
On 19 April 2009, Thomas J. Brown said:
That's how we thought L was supposed to work, but we weren't sure. And yeah, we're not good at trig. -)
On 25 April 2009, Lal said:
I was so happy when I figured it out lol
On 7 September 2010, said: