Just had this very cool math puzzle/problem emailed to me. Quite neat:

You'll need a calculator for this one.

1. Punch in the first three digits of you phone number (NOT your area code)
2. Multiply by 80
3. Add one
4. Multiply by 250
5. Add the LAST four digits of your phone number
6. Add the last four digits of your phone number again
7. Subtract 250
8. Divide by two

Recognise your answer?

Fun! I just shared it with my coworkers, amuse them for a bit too. Thanks! It was the 3:30 slump fun!

it really amuses me that people spend the time to come up with such crazy ways of doing nothing.

(this boils down to multiplying the first three digits of your phone number by 10,000 (because it's in the 100's, and phone numbers are in the 1,000,000's), and adding the last four digits, with some obfuscation of adding and subtracting the same amount in between.)

some of the really long ones are fun to undo algebraically, though.

Dudeness. That's pretty cool.

-Ash

Ok, so this is immediately what I did - got out the scratch paper and worked it out by hand. Yup, I am a nerdy engineer My dad was a math teacher and used to make these types of number games up on the spot for me. I was always amazed until he showed me how to do them myself. Then I'd make them up for him.