I don't know if anyone else read any of the Brown Paper Schoolbooks series. It's held up well--I read my favorites in the library a few months ago and still enjoyed them. Lots of good titles, like I Hate Mathematics and I am not a Short Adult!

The content inside lived up to the titles, too. (Yes, yes, remember to tip your waitress, but don't push her over.) There was one puzzle that I remembered off-and-on, but it seemed so unsolvable at the time. It was this:

The "product" of a word is as follows: let A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26. Multiply all the values together. Duplicates count twice, so BEE=2*5*5=50, not 2*5.

Now what is the closest you can get to 100000000 without going over? Or without getting to 100000000? The book mentioned WYOMING as a good one. That got 98894250. The book was a second edition, though, and it mentioned a reader sent in "LIZZARDS." 99874944. Oops, extra Z.

So I wondered if you could do better than WYOMING, or even LIZZARDs. I wondered if the words would be obvious.

Without a high-powered computer, this sort of thing was impossible--but I finally say down, turned around and figured it out. It was maybe 70 lines of code, 30 of which were parsing input...and the results were interesting. Well, to me.