£8,000 split between a widow, five sons and four daughters — what's her cut?
A man left £8,000 to be divided among his widow, five sons and four daughters. Each son was to receive three times as much as each daughter, and each daughter was to receive twice as much as the widow. What was the widow's share?
Reveal the answer
£205, 2s 6d, and 10/13 of a penny — one of Dudeney's deliberately 'impossible' exact-fraction answers, a joke about tidy-sounding inheritance rules producing money nobody could actually hand over in coin. From Henry Dudeney's Amusements in Mathematics (1917), puzzle No. 7.
— Henry Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics — Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1917, Puzzle No. 7
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