Clues for the third puzzle

Trial and error doesn't work very well here. You'll need considerable luck. The figure isn't exact, but it's pretty close, so you might be able to make your own luck by measuring the sides.

There's a better way. Assign letters to the sizes of the squares. You don't even have to assign letters to all the squares, just a couple of adjacent ones to start with. Let the little purple square be x, and the pale yellow one above it be y.

Then the one to the right will have to be x + y, since the length of its left edge is the sum of the lengths of the right edges of x and y.

See if you can fill in the rest of the squares with algebraic expressions indicating their sizes.

Next clue.

Back to Puzzle 3.

1999. This page may be printed for classroom use.
David E. Joyce

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610

The address of this file is http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoye/puzzles/square1.html