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A nice take on the letter/number assignment type puzzle with a 1:2 ratio as opposed to the more normal 1:1 and with thematic clues as well. Nice gentle puzzle. Thanks Ploy.

Yippee! I've managed to do a mathematical without having to restart it at least once, normally I require a minimum of 2 restarts. The last 5 letters that I needed to assign numbers to probably took me as long as sorting out the first eleven. I often find in mathematicals that they present two problems, firstly seeing the logic to break the back of the puzzle and secondly a bit of a slog to resolve the last few. A lovely puzzle and an end game that gives 100% assuredness of the correctness of the grid.

ROBERTWHITE78 - your interpretation is incorrect. The choice of 'across parity' for each letter is independent of all the others.

Cheers, thanks very much.

I usually persist with these numericals having worked out primes, squares, triangular numbers, roots, etc, etc, but this is beyond me! I haven’t a clue what the preamble means so don’t know where to start. So I’m afraid I’m going to give this one a miss. Good luck to those who know what they are doing!

This - like all Listener numericals - is a strong confirmation to me of my belief that the human race is divided into verbal animals, and calculating animals - or more probably, verbal only animals, and verbal-plus-calculating-bolted-on animals. So we see some solvers expressing pleasure at what a breeze this one is, and some - I suspect a large majority - of regular solvers simply turning off until next week.
On personal experience, I enjoy the intricate wordplay of the verbal crosswords, but feel almost totally baffled by the numericals - even when I understand the principles like triangular numbers and primes etc. involved; and I think this must be down to a kind of inherent fundamental gestalt - I wrestled with quadratic equations and calculus at school for years without ever getting a 'feeling' for them - or even grasping the point of them; and I only finally understood the algebra of Pythagoras Theorem when - ahahhh!! - I constructed it in plane Euclidean geometry - pictures rather than abstractions; I then used it happily for my entire working life.
A year of statistics (for experimental psychology) at uni were simply uncomprehending torture.

So with this one I hugely appreciate the cleverness of the clues, each very ingeniously and wittily spelling out thematic items, as words - but while it's only simple arithmetic, the mathematical landscape of the clues is shrouded in mist.

Acting on an early hint, I've surprised myself by getting one large entry completely unambiguously solved, and another shorter one narrowed down to two possibilities; and I think I have the two 'entangled' values for just one letter; but no insights for further progress appear: I think that it may depend on the solving of simultaneous equations - but I haven't the skill to do these.
My only other option is repeated 'brute force' trial substitutions to try to find the entries checked by my one certain entry - but that's horribly inelegant and could take weeks...can I be bothered?

Does anyone have the statistics of how numbers of submissions for the numericals compare with those for the verbals?

Quixote. Twenty years ago the average entry for a mathematical puzzle was much higher than those for the word ones by about a couple of hundredish. Nowadays it's still higher but not by as much as it was. The Listener website has all the stats you need to do the comparisons.

Elegantly put, Quixote. I have a degree in Mathematics but struggle with most of the numericals. I usually get about halfway through then hit a contradiction which means starting again. This one went on the "life's too short pile" although, like you, I'd 'solved' a couple of entries based on the hints given. The last one that I recall completing, and really enjoying, was 4490 Rejob by Botox which, if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend with its excellent reveal at the end.

Simond9x - thank you.

Oyler - I'm astounded, but on trying to check submission ratios on the Listener website as you suggest, I can only see long lists of puzzles denoted by number and year - not dated, and with no indication of which are verbal and which numerical; the titles are no help.
I suppose I could count off weeks in each year to find them, but rather a chore and prone to error. Can you point me to a page with comparative stats, please?

Quixote. On the statistics page under the Documents by year there is a clickable link. You can download each year. You've probably done that. Finding the mathematical ones is a bit harder. There are the usual suspects Arden, Googly, Elap etc. However if you go to the puzzles section and click on a year then you get a list of all the puzzles in that year and clicking on a puzzle tells you what it's about. A bit of a faff but it works.