An Unusual Pattern by David Cole

Author:David Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Common Deer Press
Published: 2019-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

We were pretty sure that the clues all pointed to numbers, but three of them still had us stumped.

I was focused on the clue about addition and multiplication.

“What number makes it bigger when you add it, but not when you multiply it?” I asked.

This time it was Stephanie who figured it out.

“It’s easy,” she said. “The number one!”

Of course! When you add one to a number, it gets bigger, but when you multiply a number by one, it stays the same. Stephanie had nailed it! That left only two clues to solve.

“To make a shape,” Catherine said, “you need sides. Like a square has four sides, a pentagon has five, and so on.”

“That makes sense,” Justin agreed. “But the clue says you need ‘at least these.’ I don’t get what that even means.”

“Three!” shouted Catherine, drawing a look of surprise from the rest of the Math Kids.

“To make a shape with sides, you have to have at least three of them. You can’t make a shape with just one or two sides.”

That made sense. A triangle was the shape with the least number of sides.

“What about a circle?” Justin countered. “A circle only has one side, just curved around.”

“True,” Stephanie said, “but then you’re really not arranging the sides, are you?”

Catherine agreed. “Good point, Stephanie. Also, the clue says ‘at least these,’ which would mean more than one, wouldn’t it?”

“Only one more to go,” I said, but before I could go on, Justin chimed in.

“Correction. No more to go,” he said.

We all looked at him in anticipation. Had he figured out the last clue?

Up or down it stays the same, but on its side, it goes and goes

“What number looks the same right-side up or upside-down?” he asked. We all shouted a different number.

“Zero.”

“One.”

“Eight.”

“Everyone is right so far,” Justin said. “Now, how do those numbers look when you lay them on their side?”

This one stumped us for a bit. A zero laid on its side still looked kind of like a zero, just a little squashed. A one looked like just a straight line going sideways. But the eight—that was a different story. An eight laid on its side looked like ∞.

“That’s the symbol for infinity!” I yelled.

“Right,” grinned Justin. “And infinity doesn’t end, right? You might say that it ‘goes and goes.’”

High fives all around. We had the last number! The problem was, we didn’t know what to do with the numbers now that we had found them.

We all looked at the clues, trying to find anything that would help us spot a pattern. If there even was a pattern, that is.

Justin, who is one of those people that can spot even the smallest detail out of place, noticed something wrong in Stephanie’s notes.

“You spelled desert wrong,” he said. “It only has one s.”

I certainly hadn’t noticed that, but then my spelling skills were nothing to brag about. Math came easy to me, but English and spelling weren’t my strong subjects. Stephanie was about to use her finger to erase one of the s’s but stopped just before she did it.

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