Sunday Times Teaser 2529
by Victor Bryant
Published: 13 March 2011 (link)
A letter to The Times concerning the inflated costs of projects read: “When I was a financial controller, I found that multiplying original cost estimates by pi used to give an excellent indication of the final outcome.” Interestingly, I used the same process (using 22/7 as a good approximation for pi). On one occasion, the original estimate was a whole number of pounds (less than £100,000), and this method for the probable final outcome gave a number of pounds consisting of exactly the same digits, but in the reverse order.
What was the original estimate?
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Brian Gladman permalink12345678910# the original estimate (a multiple of seven since it# must give an integer when multiplied by 22 / 7)for amount in range(7, 100000, 7):# reverse its digitsrev = int(str(amount)[::-1])# and test for this being (22 / 7) times the originalif 22 * amount // 7 == rev:print('The original estimate was £{:,d}.'.format(amount))
