Smith's age

Smith works at an insurance agency and spending so much time thinking about numbers, data and death tables, which does not know how to talk about anything else. When he has to solve a statistical problem he goes home running to explain it to his wife, which he always says he has no idea of ​​mathematics, to illustrate it in the art of numbers.

Not long ago, she explained a problem that will make him think twice before going home with mathematical gossip. It happened that he arrived home and, after explaining one of his statistical riddles, which by the way, did not find the enthusiastic reception he expected, blushed that if his orange half managed to expose a problem on dates or ages that he could not solve In 10 minutes, he promised not to explain any riddle until the first anniversary of that day was fulfilled. Surely he referred to the following year, but since this happened on February 29, 1896 he had no choice but to fulfill his promise literally.

The problem proposed by his wife was:

"Let's see, Tom, if you were three times my age when we met for the first time, and now I am exactly the age that you were then, and when I have three times my current age the sum of our years will be 100 years exact, "Can you tell me what age you will be on February 29?"

It was a spontaneous but very good riddle, and it is not as easy as it seems.

When Smith and his wife met, he was 3 times her age but on that day of the leap year 1896 she was the same age as she first found themselves.

The mathematicians and other sages in astrology and hidden sciences have shown that Tom was 15 years old and his beloved 5 when they met so that on February 29, 1896 she was 15 years old and he 25. So when she has 45 he will have 55 which will make her combined ages join a century.

Some of our scientists who thought that Tom was 25 on February 29, 1896 incurred the error (like Tom himself) to believe that 1900, for which 4 years were missing, it was the next year bidiest Tom was 29 years old then (and could re -raise problems to his wife). However, for a strange 1900 calendar trick, it was not a leap year. The following leap year did not occur until 1904 on whose occasion Tom would be 33 years old.