Exercise of the Week #14

We’re back with some English after a little break!

Last Week’s Answers

This puzzle is known as a ‘cryptarithm’. Aside from being quite fun, they appear frequently in mathematical challenges, so it’s good to have a method for tackling them.

To solve cryptarithms, we must use logic and pattern recognition.

Note that F can only be 1, as even if both of the hundreds’ digits were 9, the maximum value for F would be 1.

Then, we know that the digits in the tens and ones’ positions must be the same.

We can use trial and error of values to work out the rest: given there are only a small number of possibilities, it shouldn’t take a prohibitively long time.

If we use these tips, we will find out that SUN + FUN = FANS represents 874 + 174 = 1048.