What’s the largest number you can represent with 3 digits? Nope. It’s not 999. – IOTW Report

What’s the largest number you can represent with 3 digits? Nope. It’s not 999.

Sunday, 20 March 2016, 8:30 BFH Uncategorized 49

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“Your daughter was being disruptive in class.”

“Tell me what happened” was all I said as I tried not to stare through the principal’s skull with my X-ray vision superpower.

“Your daughter tried to correct her math teacher. The teacher explained why she was wrong, and she insisted that she was correct.”

I laughed.

I knew she was right and the teacher was wrong. I couldn’t wait to hear this one.

“What was the question?” I asked as the principal was about to interject a rebuke to my outburst.

The teacher was also present, and he spoke up. “The question was, what was the largest number that can be represented with 3 digits. I said it was 999, your daughter disagreed.”

I remember thinking “Uh-oh. What the heck was she thinking?”

That’s when she spoke up, anger in her voice, “Oh yeah? Tell me what 9 raised to the 9th power raised to the 9th power is then??”

Holy crap! She was right! Technically, the problemĀ is not asking for the largest 3-digit number, which is exactly where my mind went upon hearing the question. The question is asking you to represent a number using 3 digits, so exponentiation cannot be ruled out.

I looked over at her and smiled and said “Way to go! You’re 100% correct!” And I gave her a high-five. She smiled. Then cried some

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49 Comments on What’s the largest number you can represent with 3 digits? Nope. It’s not 999.

  9. My kid recently started fractions. I noticed he was writing fractions like 4/8, 5/10, etc., so I told him he was right, but the answers could be “more right” if they are reduced. He picked up on reducing right away, I barely had to point it out. He came back with a note from the teacher, “We aren’t reducing yet.” I told my kid good job, dude.

  11. As they say: “Facts are very stubborn things”
    Try as they might, not even Liberal agenda and Common Core methods can change them, but they sure can be an expensive pain in ass to fight!
    Cudos to this man for fighting this Communist Group-Think mentality!

  12. And (9!^9!^9!)! is even more bigger!

    Still only 3 digits (and some other symbols), or are we only sposed to use digits, and not placements, superscripts, or subscripts?

  16. Awesome find BFH. Thanks. Now we have to ask that question of our smarty pants grandkids.
    DH used to play mental math “games” with them even before they were five years old and it payed off.

    DH enjoyed the article also. Try as I will though, I can’t get him to comment here or anywhere. Stubborn Kraut. I know he’d enjoy the company here.

  17. My younger sister raised her hand to correct her 7th grade history teacher’s spelling. He spelled “pharaoh” wrong when he wrote it on the board during a unit about ancient Egypt. Instead of thanking her for paying attention and catching his error, he made it into a huge disciplinary thing that involved meetings with my parents and the “team”. He claimed that after correcting him, she “crossed her arms, smiled and looked around the room triumphantly”. Instead of saying, “good job” and going on with the lesson, he made sure that no one in that class forgot that my sister corrected him.

  19. I might have won the spelling bee in 6th grade back in 1965 if my best friend hadn’t tripped me up by making funny faces at me and causing me to laugh and lose my train of thought. I lost to the one Japanese girl in the class who was a real smart cookie. I can still out spell just about anybody if you don’t make me laugh. As well as

    read and write coherently. Thanks Mom for teaching me to read and spell phonetically back in the early 60′ s when they thought I was retarded because the look say/method (Dick and Jane, see Spot run etc., what a bunch of gobbledegook) of reading and writing made no sense to me.

  26. In scoring standardized tests, I did a couple of math projects. I was surprised at how many “right” answers would be accepted. If the student did something like this we would have given a top score. Any time the student answered above grade, we were to reward them with a top score.

    Of course, that was about 7 years ago before Common Core. Don’t know what they do now because I only do the writing portions.

  27. The smarmy ass comments calling him a liar and debating him on the original post shows the libs flailing in desperation. They constantly argue black is white to make their reality work. I always taught my kids when they were right stick with it. There may be some undesired and undeserved consequences but stick with it.

  33. I missed the answer to my question in the article.
    *oops*

    Wow…and that girly was only about 12 when she gave them hell…impressive! And bravo to the father for such tenacity.

    Kommun Korpse…indeed!

  34. @robotlivesmatter – In Winows, I use the character map tool. It is somewhat tedious to find the char you’re looking for, but once you do you can select it and copy it to the clipboard. On my Chromebook, there’s an extension I use for UTF-8 and Unicode chars that does more-or-less the same thing but with a lot more choices.

    In older versions of Windows, you used to be able to hold down the alt key and type in the numeric representation of a character on the numeric keypad to get that character entered as text. That went away some time back – I didn’t notice when.

    HTH

  40. Kudos to the kid for thinking outside the box but if the father wants to split hairs I will go as far as saying “digits” has multiple meanings. One being fingers. I can write the symbol for infinity using three fingers, which beats 9^9^9.

  42. I was called into a parent-teacher conference when my daughter was in kindergarten. My daughter refused to participate in a class activity where everyne was supposed to guess how many jelly beans where in a jar. She just flat out refused to guess which is why I was called in. After hearing of my daughters heinous action I went home and asked her why she wouldn’t guess. She said: “It’s stupid. Who cares how many jelly beans are in a jar”. Point taken. I had to respect that view by a 6 year old.

    Ironically my daughter is now a cost accountant. Yup, she’s a bean counter.

  47. The linked article goes on to discuss another problem involving triangles.

    Can somebody explain to me how you construct a triangle with three 90 degree legs?

    Damn new math. I hate it.

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