The Garden Puzzle
Professor Rackbrain tells me that he was recently smoking a friendly pipe under a tree in the garden of a country acquaintance. The garden was enclosed by four straight walls, and his friend informed him that he had measured these and found the lengths to be 80, 45, 100, and 63 yards respectively. "Then," said the professor, "we can calculate the exact area of the garden." "Impossible," his host replied, "because you can get an infinite number of different shapes with those four sides." "But you forget," Rackbrane said, with a twinkle in his eye, "that you told me once you had planted this tree equidistant from all the four corners of the garden." Can you work out the garden's area?
H. E. Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics (1917) · No. 182
No hints for this one.
Check your full solution
Attach photos of your pages (up to 3) or one PDF — or check what you typed above. Lemma reads the work and verifies the reasoning, not just the answer.
Your first check today doesn't need an account.
Your photos and PDFs are read once and not stored — only the transcription is kept.