A number of cats got together and decided to kill between them 999919 mice. Every cat killed an equal number o


cats
James asked:


A number of cats got together and decided to kill between them 999919 mice. Every cat killed an equal number of mice. Each cat killed more mice than there were cats. How many cats do you think there were ?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “A number of cats got together and decided to kill between them 999919 mice. Every cat killed an equal number o”

  1. vijay Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 5:04 am

    mice were too smart for cats. they all ran away

  2. Bracha Says:
    May 21st, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    One?

    First you must factorize 999919. But I haven’t found any factors of 999919 yet.

    I think 1 is correct. Because the cat killed more mice (999919) than there were cats (1).

  3. armless_man Says:
    May 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 pm

    There are 991 cats and they killed 1009 mice each

  4. nwyrk2552 Says:
    May 25th, 2009 at 8:15 pm

    991 cats each killed 1,009 mice.

  5. BB Says:
    May 29th, 2009 at 2:38 am

    There were 991 cats, and each of them killed 1009 mice.

    To check, 991*1009 = 999919

    Solution:

    Get the prime factorization of 999919
    The prime factors are 991 and 1009 only

  6. ^K-A^ Says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 8:07 am

    It depends, I guess.
    A number of cats “decided” to kill 999919 mice. It is unknown whether they did kill them all.

  7. finelearner Says:
    June 4th, 2009 at 3:43 am

    Using fermat’s method find the Prime factor.
    Now Let n = 999919 and square root is appx 1000
    so i = 1000 , we find that sqrt(999^-999919)
    = sqrt(81) = 9
    Then 1000 - 9= 991 and 1000+ 9 = 1009
    By multificaton we verify that 991*1009 = 999919
    As Each cat killed more mice than the numebr of cats
    Hence there were 991 cats and each cat killed 1009 mice.

  8. Pranil Says:
    June 5th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

    Dear finelear
    Sorry, as I can not email you, I am contacting here.
    Please explain the step below.
    we find that sqrt(999^-999919)
    = sqrt(81) = 9
    If possible e-mail me for number factors of 24999 by this method.

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