Test your skills of deduction with the May 2021 edition of Riddle Me This: Fence Building
A farmer challenges an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician to build him a fence that encloses the most area with the least amount of fencing.
The mathematician makes a circular fence, claiming that it is most efficient.
The physicist made a long straight line of fence and said the length was infinite, as fencing half the world was the most efficient way.
The engineer laughed at the others, and then proceeded to build the winning fence. What did he build?
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Engineer’s fence should have been triangular shaped for minimization
i claim the the mathematician would have done what you say the engineer did. the circumference: area ratio of a circle is 2/r, while that of a square is 4/s, so building a fence that encloses the smallest possible space achieves the highest c/a. It’s not really clear that this is what the farmer desired, however.
How did the physicist select the diameter of his fence? She must have had a specific area in mind; this value was not specified in the problem statement, so the physicist is DQ’d
Puts me in mind of Zeno’s paradox and the engineer & mathematician.
Of the three, you would expect the engineer to propose a PRACTICAL solution. However, in this fanciful instance, although the “engineer” may consider himself to be clever, his design is of no use whatsoever to the farmer, who needs a fence for a real-world purpose. Declaring himself to be on the outside is what one might expect from a fool, although, sadly, such assertions and “reasoning” are all too typical these days.
A rectangle.