Crossword Help Forum
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xij, your 2nd and 4th numbers are correct.

Your 1st and 3rd digits are each adrift by 1. The others are spot on

Simplesimon, thanks for your response. I will look again at my working notes and apply your reasoning.

As I'm teetotal for medical reasons the frazzling of my brain had nothing to do with alcohol; it was just the result of repeatedly scanning clues for the way forward.

The message certainly reflected my feelings. Give me Sabre any day. I fact I completed Sabre's recent puzzle rather more quickly.

Xij, your values for O and T are correct (assuming same order as in 13A).

For the value of R, use 21A. The power term is the dominant one - all the rest are too small to give you a four-digit answer. There is only one number which will give you a 4-digit answer for the power term.

We obtained a value for U using 13A, quite late on in the puzzle, when we were reduced to only 4 possible values for U, and we had values for the rest of the terms. Substituting in these values in turn, we found that only one answer could be entered into the grid.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Tatters/Unclued/Simplesimon, that allows me to enter a few cells. Two more queries: does O/O indicate 1, and does ! indicate sum or product? As you can tell, maths is not my strong point, but I do enjoy the challenge, although three days is stretching it a bit.

Xij. Correct, O/O gives 1. The ! Symbol is the factorial notation, essentially shorthand fora product. For example 5! Is 5x4x3x2x1.

Thanks once again simplesimon. Never seen the ! in maths before. Now all I’ve got to do is work out all the equations trying not to forget the Bodmas system, which I only found out about a few years ago. Wasn’t taught that way when I was a kid.

Murky, the alcohol reference was because of a typo in your post. You wrote that you were tempted to give up at a few "pints" instead of points. I feel that way at many of the Listener puzzles. For this one, though, numbers being the same in the U.K. and the U.S., I had a relatively easy time. Even now that the answers are available for the puzzle from two weeks ago, I still don't get many of them.

Actually it was the three-weeks-ago puzzle I meant.

I did manage to complete this without recourse to help from the forum but I didn't find it as straightforward as others seem to have found it. I took the preamble, "in an order to be determined" to mean there was some sort of derivable structure to the assignment of numbers to letters, alas no!
I find these numerical puzzles daunting to get started on and accept they are going to be slow going and to have to apply a different sort of 'whole puzzle' methodology to making progress with them. But the end-game was well worth it. Thanks to Piccadilly.