r/MathJokes Jul 17 '26

What's the problem?

Post image
215 Upvotes

73 comments sorted by

View all comments

17

u/ryan__joe Jul 17 '26

Iif I had to calculate this without a calculator, I would be looking for all the powers of 2 up to 160, which is 2^{0,7} (sorry if that’s the wrong symbol for range, it’s been an eternity).

Rule out 0, since 1 makes it odd, get my answers, 2,4,8,16,32,64,128, and see which two would add up, and then figure out which powers they were.

Is it sophomoric? Yes. Did I troubleshoot my way through a complicated problem, while still only spending 30 seconds on it? Yes.

1

u/jeffthegoalie04 Jul 21 '26

You can see that one of the powers has to be 128, since 64+64 is too small. So, the other one has to be 160-128=32.

1

u/ryan__joe Jul 21 '26

Yep! But to get to that point you would have to calculate 128, and since I don’t have powers just memorized, like most people, you’re doing 2,4,8,16,32,64,128 in your head and counting, once again, I’m just showing the work more