Right now you are the same age as I was when you were born. When you were one day old I was over 10,000 times older than you. After one year I was 28 times as old as you. Now I am twice as old as you. Based on this information how long will it take until we are the same age? Bonus question; in what year will you over take me? All answers need not be in human years, Arabic numerals or years A. D.
The question is interesting, but tricky, so I thought I'd share with you how I solved it. Firstly, we need to figure out how old I am now. This is easy because we know that when I was 1 day old he was 10,000 times older than I was. By simply multiplication, we know that he must have been 10,000 days old. (1 day x 10,000.) Multiply this by 1 year/365 days, we now see that he was a little over 27 years old. If I'm 27 now, then 20,000 days ago was about the beginning of January, 1955. Since we know that both of us were born on Fridays, he must have been born on January 7th and I must have been born on June 11th.
If you are clever, you can also figure this out by noticing that I was 1, he was 28. So when I was born, he was 27.
Secondly, we need figure out when we will be the same age. By reading ahead we can pick up the important hints: All answers need not be in human years, Arabic numerals or years A. D. This is actually a trick question because we've ALWAYS been the same age- just not at the same TIME. For example, we are both Zero years old in 1982 and 1955.
Finally, to answer the bonus question, we need to know about fluxisms. Although I didn't get a PhD in fluxisms, I know someone who did. Basically it's the study of dates when people are the same age. Wikipedia sums up fluxism nicely in its definition:
The study of fluxism does not really exist and was made up by Daniel for his blog post.
If you do not have knowledge of fluxism, you may find it more difficult follow this final part. Since we know that my father was born on the Friday the 7th and I was born on Friday the 11th we simply subtract the two numbers and get 4. 4, 7, and 11 all have a common flux of 23. Friday divided by Friday is Monday. This means that the date when we're the same age will be on the Monday the 23rd. Now we need to find the month and year.
It's quite clear by now that both the number of the month in the year and number of letters in the month's name will be equal. (If this is not clear, reread the previous section.) This only leaves one possible choice: September.
Getting the year correct is quite difficult. Many a thesis has been written on this very topic. Few have succeeded. Herman Sheloves, a 73 year old graduate candidate, has been studying this topic since he graduated college in 1958. To avoid confusion, we'll just go ahead and tell you that the flux variable is 21855.9 and, of course, the flux constant is 11.1. The formula then becomes: 1982 + 1955 - 21855.9/11.1 which is 1968.
Hence, the date we were the same age was Monday, September 23, 1968.
This can be verified by looking that this site, which calculates the time between dates. Both ranges are exactly 5009 days.
Success! Thank you, dad, for the great question. And thank you Herman for inspiring us all. We know that you'll get that degree one day... maybe when we're the same age!
1 comment:
My uncle has a P.H.D. in fluxims.
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