A master puzzler once showed his apprentice the following 3 numbers:

1 5 9

and asked him "Do you know what the next one is?"

The apprentice replied, "With only three numbers it would be very difficult to figure out the sequence but it appears to be an arithmetic series with each next number being 4 more than the previous."

The master puzzler smiled knowingly and said "Some say the fourth number of the sequence is 3 times the second number, others claim it is the sum of the first three. Do you know the fifth, which is also the last number?"

The apprentice wrote four numbers on a piece of paper and was totally baffled as to what the last number could be. "Why would you think I should know this?" he asked.

The master answered "Because you like to read."

(In reply to But some say... by Charlie)

The numbers given (1, 5, 9) and the number indirectly given (15) represent the positions of the letters A, E, I, O in the Modern English alphabet. Though incorrectly assumed by the master puzzler that there are only five vowels, the 'last' number sought is the position for the letter U, which is 21.

There are actually seven vowels in the Modern English alphabet -- A, E, I, O, U, W and Y.  Unlike the first five vowels, W and Y may also represent consonants. W, used as a vowel in English, is rare. After the Great Vowel Shift, the letter W (originating as a ligature representing two U's [UU], hence double-U) as a vowel is found almost solely in words originating in the Welsh languge. An example of which is the word cwm -- 'a steep-walled semicircular basin in a mountain'. Y is more often used as a vowel, though, when beginning a word, it behaves more frequently as a consonant.
Including all seven vowels, the finite sequence would be
1, 5, 9, 15, 21, 23, 25.

Posted by Dej Mar on 2008-01-22 02:25:01