Getting mechanical in our day to day grind, working hard or hardly working, sometimes we all tend to feel...
"damn, where did those days go, when we used to solve interesting Mathematical and Physics problems?"
Did our grey cells loose their luster ?
Or is it just that we became so busy with the laborious daily routine, that we lost the enthu and energy to tackle some real challenging stuff, that we were all good at, one point of time ?
Thanks to Caps (Ravi Kiran) for a forward he shot out a couple of months back, it did tickle the grey matter of quite a few around, in my work place.
Let me get started with the what is expected of this problem.
Find the Angle "a" !!
Although it might look too simple to begin with trust me, it will surely refresh your geometry and if needed Trigonometry too !
Once you get involved, Your mind will start running wild about 7th-9th class math (Indian Education System that is) or 9th - 12th grade (American of course, sure as for math for kids, they lag behind big time !) geometry/trigonometry/algebra, etc.
If you did not sweat too much to arrive at the solution to this question, then sure, its your perception and modesty that it came easy to you, coz in the background you did work quite as much as most of the others, trust me. :)
Why is it a Revolution?
A simple puzzle or a problem that challenges one's brain could very well tickle a hurricane, read through and you will know what I exactly mean.
Amidst my chaotic schedule, I did venture a good number of hours to revitalize my math to arrive at a solution to this problem. One would guess, apart from " Sum of three angles in a triagle = 180 degrees" there would be something else that might be needed to finish this one off. But what is it ? How do you recall it? Of course one can cheat by drawing the triangle to scale, and find the angle...but thats not what we are talking about. Thats the method of give-up-on-the-first-shot-ers.
To cut the long story short, I tried it for few hours, and gave up on it, feeling its really not worth (doh!) spending more time on it. It somehow stuck with me. I kept going back to it, on and off, starting all over, again and again and again. At which point I said, I need to get this out to other like-minded/challenge loving people, who like me at one point were too darn good at cracking these things, and somehow got busy with their daily routine and grind.
I've arrived at a state of mind where, solving the puzzle was not as important, as seeing the pleasure the brute enthusiasm, the zeal, the grut, the grind in seeing the folks around me (especially at work, for some reason) to enjoy the feeling of doing something intellectual for a change.
So, it started off with a casual conversation over a coffee at work, with Uvi, AjayJ, Keith, John D, SujitM and Sireesh. Their eyes lit up seeing a triangle, to start with. I mean, c'mon, how frequently will you see people at work do things like these.
During the course of the next week or so, this puzzle was changing hands faster than a spam mail ! Ok Ok thats stretching it a bit too far, but you get the point. People of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicity, were getting involved. It even went to the extent, that it made its way onto the board of one of the conference rooms, and people who gathered around ran around to pick up a paper and pen to grab the gist and go back to their desks to solve it !
The Solution
Thanks to the commitment and zeal of AjayJ, who by the way, derived way many things to motivate challenge and encourage himself to finally get to the bottom of the puzzle. Coming from a family of math scholars from India, as he recalls, he was quite obligated to spend that extra energy, to not to ignore and move forward with the solution. Again, most of us would be able to do it, but it takes what it takes to finally cross the finish line, and he deserves to get the credit for that !
So far its been an amazing experience to see so many people around me dig in and try to solve it albeit their backgrounds and no matter how busy they are, what problems they have or what position they are in.
To justify all, I will publish the solution, as we arrived at, a few days from now, and in the interim would appreciate other readers out here to chip in and see if they can arrive at the finishing line !
And the Solution is: http://www.mediafire.com/?9pf9kmhulye
