Numbers and Letters

This problem appeared in my email from Puzzle a Day:

There are 19 students in my university logic class. 15 of them play soccer, 16 play tennis, 12 like art, 5 enjoy history and 1 absolutely loves science. My university is situated at number 13 Main Street. My university’s logo is blue and it was designed ? years ago. How many years ago was my university’s logo designed?

I was clueless as to how to approach this problem even after I got the clue: Convert letters to numbers. What letters to convert was then the intermediate problem. I didn't know and looked at the solution:

My university’s logo was designed 25 years ago.

Each number in the question is the alphabetical position of the letter following it.

The final sentence is ‘My university’s logo is blue and it was designed ? years ago.’ The question mark is followed by the letter ‘y’, which is the 25th letter of the alphabet. This makes 25 the answer.

Let's add some formatting to the original question:

There are 19 students in my university logic class. 15 of them play soccer, 16 play tennis, 12 like art, 5 enjoy history and 1 absolutely loves science. My university is situated at number 13 Main Street. My university’s logo is blue and it was designed ? years ago. How many years ago was my university’s logo designed?

Once you see the "trick", it's easy and I'm forearmed now to face any future problems of a similar nature. Here's one of my own design:

There are 24 children in a class. 11 study German. \(x\) study Maths. What is the value of \(x\)?

The "trick" here is to determine how the numbers 24 and 11 are derived in the two sentences. There are 24 letters in the first sentence and 11 letters in the second sentence. There are ten letters in the third sentence and so "10 study Maths". The value of \(x\) is 10.

I mentioned Puzzle a Day in a post titled 2023 TO THE POWER OF 2023 in March 28th 2023. I should make more use of this resource. The emails were not going to my Primary email tab but to my Social tab and was missing them. I've redirected them to go to my Primary tab now.

Finally here are the correspondences that were used in both problems:

"a": 1, "b": 2,"c": 3,"d": 4,"e": 5, "f": 6, "g": 7,"h": 8,"i": 9,"j": 10,"k": 11,"l": 12,"m": 13, "n": 14,"o": 15,"p": 16,"q": 17,"r": 18,"s": 19,"t": 20,"u": 21,"v": 22,"w": 23,"x": 24,"y": 25,"z": 2