Good afternoon and welcome! Yesterday afternoon I received an envelope containing twenty hotel bills, a lipstick, a Zip-lock baggie filled with Spanish Moss, a gold-nugget, and some cocktail napkins with math puzzles written on them. This can only mean that Doctor E delivered again and its time for another incarnation of his boffo math contest! Every fortnight, the mysterious Doctor E supplies another puzzle for you to think about, and at the end of the semester, prizes of $60, $40 and $20 go to the top three finishers, with handsome certificates, suitable for framing, going to all sufficiently high-scoring finishers. Eligible contestants include University of Northern Iowa students, Iowa high school students, and Illinois high school students!

Turning in the correct solution to this week's puzzle by September 30th will earn 2 puzzle points. A correct solution along with your own, original example of a Hysteron Proteron will get 3 puzzle points!

The Jain Writer Acarya Hemacandra (1150 AD) wrote poetry, and also wrote about poetry. He assumed the duration of a long syllable (L) of a word to be twice the length of a short syllable (S). So if a line of poetry had a length of six beats, it could look like this: SSSSSS or this: LLL or this: LSLS or this: SSLL or this: SSLSS, with many other possibilities, as long as the total length of syllables added up to six.

How many possible ways are there to get a poetry line of length 25 beats?

The deadline for sending in solutions has expired. But feel free to take some time to work on this one, and click here to see the answer. Alternatively, click here to see the current challenge.

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