Sophie led us through the following problem from the Museum of Math’s weekly puzzle during COVID. Sign up for emails from MoMath.
PUZZLE: Coconut Classic
Five men and a monkey, marooned on an island, collect a pile of coconuts to be divided equally the next morning. During the night, however, one of the men decides he’d rather take his share now. He tosses one coconut to the monkey and removes exactly 1/5 of the remaining coconuts for himself. A second man does the same thing, then the third, fourth, and fifth. The following morning the men wake up together, toss one more coconut to the monkey, and divide the rest equally.What’s the least original number of coconuts needed to make this whole scenario possible?
Mind-Benders for the Quarantined! (Museum of Math, NYC)
We had a lot of interesting ideas and shared a few strategies, but we didn’t get to a solution.
In hindsight, I realize that this problem is annoyingly gender-specific. Why men? And why does it matter? I tried rewriting the problem using “they” is instead of “he,” but it seems to lead to some confusion about how many people were taking actions. Does this rewritten version work?
PUZZLE: Coconut Classic
Five people and a monkey, marooned on an island, collect a pile of coconuts to be divided equally the next morning. During the night, however, one of the people decides they would rather take their share now. The person tosses one coconut to the monkey and removes exactly 1/5 of the remaining coconuts for themselves. A second person does the same thing, then the third, fourth, and fifth. The following morning the people wake up together, toss one more coconut to the monkey, and divide the rest equally.
What’s the least original number of coconuts needed to make this whole scenario possible?
Maybe someone has a better gender-neutral version of the problem?
