A man asks his father about his age.

Instead of giving a direct answer the father wrote down two positive integer numbers on a piece of paper and says:

- Sum these two numbers and evaluate the square root of the total. Doing this, youŽll get my age.

The son takes his pocket calculator and inadvertently types the two numbers, one after the other, without pressing the "+" button (e.g. if the numbers were 124 and 357, he types 124357, instead of the sum of the numbers).

After this he makes a second mistake by pressing the square root button, not once, but twice.

Finding an integer number as the result he shows it to his father:

- This is your age.

- No, youŽre wrong, but the number you found is precisely the age of your mother, who is older than me.

How old is the father?

Note: While a solution is trivial with the aid of a spreadsheet, can you derive it without one?

(In reply to Challenge by ed bottemiller)

Understanding that you meant this to be an "add-on" to this problem, I think you would have more success at having your challenge met if you posted the appropriate text as your own problem.  In likelihood we could see it in public (and not too distance from this) within 2 (?) weeks, could be sooner.

My concern is that this somewhat akin to people posting problems in the forums; yes I know it's not quite the same, but for internal site consistency I think it would be better.

Should you choose to do that, edit with a suggestion of a challenge to follow, and within your new problem link back to this problem.

Posted by brianjn on 2008-08-06 00:36:31