Math Question - english translation issue

canhazphysics
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:16:58 +0000

FYI, a very similarly worded question (or two) was in the blue book. Instead of the weird symbols, they can do these questions too.

An evident observation is that 20*20=400, so the max you’ll go is around 20.

You start multiplying every consecutive odd number then - 31(if the answer’s 10, they consider 1 odd), 35, 57, 79…1719, but just check 19*21 anyway, and it turns out to be 399. So there you are.