Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

I tend to think of logic as being a more important aspect of mathematics than calculation. Also, I don't have a calculator so I rely on a spreadsheet for doing sums.

In the light of comments, I will persevere. I do have a few inequalities.

I could have written Foinaven's post #18 myself but, like Foinaven, I've decided to give it a go. I've nibbled away at 29 (which gives me some ideas about 3 of the letters), made some assumptions about which cells can/can't contain double digits, considered palindromes but I can't break out from there. I can't see where the next step might be. Without being explicit, could anyone suggest the next clue(s) that I should take a look at? Thanks

simond9x,

If you look at 1A and 9D, you will see that there are some severe restrictions on what A, R and C can be

Thought this was good. Looked like it was going to be hard to get in but then all falls out quite straight forwardly once you have the first three of four. Almost uniquely for a numbers puzzle i didn't come across a contradiction 2/3 of the way through meaning reworking everything to find my error.

21a is where I started.

Foinavon, Simon9x. The way in we followed was via 29 dn, 24 dn and 33 ac. The number of digits per square is the key, and the fact that 2 of those clues are palindromes. You will then quickly arrive at answers for T, S and A.

You only need a calculator. No lists of primes, no Chambers, no strange Scottish or Spenserian words. Enjoy the logical challenge!

It would seem we have tackled this in different ways. I found 29d gave only one solution because of 30a, hence we know T,A and S immediately. 21a narrows R down, 17d then leads to C & R and so on. Look for clues where powers are, these quickly limit the choice for certain letters. I use a spreadsheet for the maths, and a o/tick 19 x 19 matrix to keep track of the possibilities.

For an all-round maths and English dunce (I wouldn't mind being in the class of 2020 as I might have got some passes!) I thought I was cruising until that horrible moment when 4ac blocked my path. So back to the beginning it was. Still second time round (and I still don't know where I strayed) everything came good. Oh how I laughed. Mind I'd never come across the exclamation mark in algebra, so hardly a normal expression or maybe I was just asleep in class that day. At least that means I've learned something new today as well as honing my XL skills some more ;¬)

I also had to restart once, and I haven't got a scooby doo where i went wrong first time - C'est la vie !! I do not think that I have ever completed a numerical on the first attempt. The problem then becomes erasing what you thought in the first place.

Foinaven - I noticed your post earlier and the mention of the tedious exercise of setting up a spreadsheet. I'm a numpty but if like me you have access to the Times site and XL I find it easiest to set up an empty text document in MS Explorer. From there copy and paste from the Adobe crossword into the doc, and edit 'A' to 'A1' etc then precede each line with a suitable unique character (say #) then edit that into '=SUM('. Suffix everything with an opposing bracket, then paste it all into columns in XL. Your A1 to W1 cells then get used to hold the numeric options (I use drop down selection lists), with the computatations in columns X and Y to the right (in this particular case). Apologies if this is stating the obvious but I use this technique regularly and it works for me. If you knew this already ignore the bletherings of an imbecile!

I enjoyed working out the numbers/letters relationships which only required about a third of the clues but then ploughing through the remaining clues was a bit of a drudge.
I suspect this was more fun to set than to solve.