I'm posting one puzzle, riddle, math, or statistical problem a day. Try to answer each one and post your answers in the comments section. I'll post the answer the next day. Even if you have the same answer as someone else, feel free to put up your answer, too!
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
One Letter
A headless man had a letter to write; It was read by a man who had lost his sight. The dumb repeated it word for word; And deaf was he who listened and heard.
This is kind of a strange puzzle. It would seem that the answer is "nothing"...i.e. a man who has lost his sight cannot read anything that has been written (by traditional pencil-on-paper methods), and similarly a dumb person (meaning someone who cannot speak) cannot repeat something, at least not verbally, etc same with the last line. What letter could be written that represents nothing? One poor answer is the letter O, representing the number zero, or nothing. But since you didn't specify the language, I'm going with the Greek letter phi, the symbol for an empty (or null) set.
Alright, now that you've taken all the joy out of my answer:
The letter I was thinking of was O which represents 0 or nothing. Since the headless man had nothing tor write and could not be read by a man who has no sight and so on...
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This is kind of a strange puzzle. It would seem that the answer is "nothing"...i.e. a man who has lost his sight cannot read anything that has been written (by traditional pencil-on-paper methods), and similarly a dumb person (meaning someone who cannot speak) cannot repeat something, at least not verbally, etc same with the last line. What letter could be written that represents nothing? One poor answer is the letter O, representing the number zero, or nothing. But since you didn't specify the language, I'm going with the Greek letter phi, the symbol for an empty (or null) set.
ReplyDeleteAlright, now that you've taken all the joy out of my answer:
ReplyDeleteThe letter I was thinking of was O which represents 0 or nothing. Since the headless man had nothing tor write and could not be read by a man who has no sight and so on...
phi is pretty creative. I like that.