Abstract
The American novelist Ben Ames Williams frequently contributed short stories, serials, and articles to the periodical The Saturday Evening Post. While themes in mathematics were seldom featured in Williams’ writings, a remarkably difficult word problem was presented within the short story Coconuts (Williams, 1926). The consequences of burdening an unsuspecting American middle class with a problem they were ill-equipped to handle were borne out over the 20 years following its publication. During this time Williams was inundated with angry letters and, worse, the occasional tedious solution to the problem he wrote into the pages of The Post (Gardner, 2001).
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