100 Bushels of Corn, Revisited

John Mount is a data scientist based in San Francisco, with 20+ years of experience in machine learning, statistics, and analytics. He is the co-founder of the data science consulting firm Win-Vector LLC, and (with Nina Zumel) the co-author of Practical Data Science with R, now in its second edition.

Nina Zumel is a data scientist based in San Francisco, with 20+ years of experience in machine learning, statistics, and analytics. She is the co-founder of the data science consulting firm Win-Vector LLC, and (with John Mount) the co-author of Practical Data Science with R, now in its second edition.

Nina Zumel presented the “100 Bushels of Corn” puzzle here as a fun example of using R as a calculator. What if we want R to solve the puzzle for us, instead of merely being a calculator?

100 bushes of corn are distributed to 100 people such that every man receives 3 bushels, every woman 2 bushels, and every child 1/2 a bushel. How many men, women, and children are there?

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