Inquisitor 1336: Additive by Xanthippe

19 comments on “Inquisitor 1336: Additive by Xanthippe”

1. Thank you for blog Holy Ghost.
   No, I have never heard that mnemonic – but neither had I ever heard of Euler’s Constant, until very heavy duty googling.
   (I was slightly embarrased on asking a friend about this, and me wrongly pronouncing it as ‘Yuler’s’.)
   Generally, I liked the stiffness of the clues and the requirement to insert numerals to replace groups of letters. But after that, nothing.
   It was a very clever idea but I feel it was just a tiny bit ‘special subject’.
   I have to admit I have never really understood these things.
   Like, why is pi r squared so important when its precise value can’t be arrived at? Just a rhetorical question.

   “Ah well” said the fox,”those grapes were probably sour”.

   Yes, maybe I might sound like that.
   My personal view is that a puzzle should be judged not by its difficulty but by its elegance.
   Assorted grumbles, etc etc.

2. In contrast to HG and jonsurdy, I found this to be very satisfying. A great PDM (which was triggered by realising 17d was ‘mispointing’) nice clues, a touch of science, and a very pretty completed grid. Maybe it’s because I’m easily pleased, but having once had one published myself, I know the difficulty of getting everything ‘just so’, and it seems to me that, with very few exceptions, all of the Inquisitors are beautifully constructed. I must say also, that I get the impression that an IQ that gives HG a good workout will leave many others (certainly me) completely baffled! It’s a fine line to tread between too easy and too hard, and it’s never going to suit everybody.

   Xanthippe very cleverly gave (for me) just enough information to allow deduction of the theme, and I felt the balance between diffculty and enjoyment was spot on! I was stumped for a few hours, then the PDM put me out of my misery! Perfect!

   Thanks to S and B.

3. Like Dan@2 I enjoyed this IQ. I particularly appreciated having a “special subject” with which I was familiar unlike the many times I find myself Googling information on others such as football or food (I have yesterday’s Independent 8628 in mind with the latter and am fearful of the former with the advent of the World Cup). So more science or mathematics based IQs please to help level the playing field for poor souls like me.

   I too have never heard of HG’s mnemonic and wonder why anyone ever felt the need to devise one apart from the challenge of it.

   Thanks HG for the blog and explaining how 22d worked and to Xanthippe for the puzzle.

4. My experience was like Dan’s, although like HG I also ended up spending a long time on “mispointing”. The PDM, with the giant lower-case e suddenly looming, was very enjoyable (perhaps coloured by relief?) and as a non-mathematician I found the theme just far enough off the beaten track. I also liked the mini-PDM with the title which only came afterwards – Additive = “e | number”…

5. Well, I got about half way through this, but the bits with the short and long answers eluded me. And not helped by guessing SOCIOBIOLOGY for 28ac.

   But, on the matter of mnemonics for e, around 1970 I read an article in the paper about a publisher bringing out a dictionary of mnemonics. I wrote to the paper with the one I knew for e, “To express e remember to memorise a sentence to simplify this” which I had read in a book by Martin Gardner a few years before. About a year later, a package arrived which turned out to be a copy of the dictionary, finally published, with that one for e and with my name in the acknowledgements.

6. I love the idea of doing a maths-themed puzzle and got the theme pretty quickly but was puzzled for a while about what we were supposed to with the blank squares.

   I started by drawing a line through them linking the “2.” with the “8”. complaining about the portrayed inaccuracy of the value of “e”. I’ve seen it quoted as simply 2.7 in the past.

   I think what was throwing me was the distance between the “2.” and the “8” in the blank-square schematic. If the wordplay to 21D could have been worked so that the “7” was clued in the same way as the “2” and “.” (I know, don’t ask me to come up with one !) I think that would have made for a more satisfying denouement.

   As it is, great to see maths and science represented in the thematic so thanks Xanthippe and to HG for the blog.

   By the way, did anyone else notice “Euler” in the grid starting at last letter of 13D then up and across ?

7. Re comment at #1, it’s not so much that its value cannot be arrived at – just that it cannot be expressed as a fraction.

8. I do like the idea of a mnemonic that needs me to remember presidents of the USA…

9. Thanks for the blog HG. It sounds as if we found the same way into the puzzle as you did.

   We really liked the idea of a mathematically themed crossword – there really should be more scientific themes in crytpics.

   Once we had the ‘point’ we were able to sort out the rest although we did have to google to find the missing numerals.

   Thanks to Xanthippe as well!

10. Thanks nmsindy

11. Well, from most of the above it’s obvious that this puzzle was popular – and that there is a bit of a demand for maths/science as a theme.
    But, what if the would-be solver has had little formal schooling? Just a broad knowledge of things picked up over the years, and an intuitive feeling of how to look for answers?
    I think specialised themes – be they based on the rules of cricket, bridge, chess – automatically exclude a lot of people.
    And these are only mildly inaccessible.

12. Why is that any more true for mathematics than it might be for literature?

13. At one time the guide was that references required should normally be available to solvers in the local library – I guess in these days that info is available to most on the net e.g. through Wikipedia and elsewhere.

14. Especially since local libraries are becoming an increasing rarity. And shame on those responsible for that!

15. I actually thought I’d completed this one, but now I find I had 21d and 28a wrong: in my defiance to do these things bareback I had “orbit” and “strichology” (not quite sure how they were derived, and guessing obviously incorrectly at the words and definitions).

    My instant response on “four clues are too long and must be made to fit” was “bet they include numbers” as the last one of these was only a few weeks ago — the Pete Seeger one. So the first clue I solved was in fact Freightage.

    I had solved the entire thing apart from that elusive 17d, where I gathered it had to be a punctuation mark, but staring at the thing for hours I still didn’t get it. The penny dropped next day after a night’s sleep. As a mathematician I’m ashamed of myself that I hadn’t got it straight away.

16. I got stumped for a while by thinking there must be something other to highlight than the very numbers I’d just entered, and the fact that in the RH side of the grid you can link the letters for EULER in a slightly circuitous route (and so was looking for CONSTANTs etc etc) – great theme, but I tend to agree there was a slight deflationary feeling at the end, caused in large part by the needless highlighting I think.

17. It seems to me very sad that there are so many grumbles about a theme that is mathematical. I am a scientist, and I complete – without grumbling – puzzles with themes on history, literature, biographies, even low-grade TV game-shows of which I have never heard. I have to use the Internet and other sources for these, so what is so OTT about having a theme relating to e? The title was a bit of a non-math giveaway anyway, and a little initiative and research would have ‘joined the dots’.

18. Laphria, there were only a few of us that grumbled – and I think we have been firmly put in our place.
    You are a scientist, so a ‘specialist’. But I feel sure that doesn’t isolate you from broader interests and subjects such as history literature etc.
    And the ‘Bullseye’ theme was gentle nostalgia (For a certain age group, admittedly.)
    I think the ‘Additive’ title only worked retrospectively . . . or maybe once we were fairly well on the way to the solution.
    This is only me chatting conversationally- not having a go at your opinion.
    I think this is one of the big problems about posting in forums etc. There is no sense of tone of voice.
    We all know that typing in CAPS is rude and shouting.
    Maybe we should have a colour code for TOV.
    Blue text for serious comment, green for irony, pink for just teasing, red for strong comment . . . purple for being a bit looney.
    Anyway, there is all tomorrow (Today?) untouched.
    Personally, I hope we get one on poetry. I was disappointed that the Dylan Thomas centenary passed unmarked.

19. Thanks for all the comments on the puzzle – its always interesting to hear what people think.
    Solvers may be interested to know that the size of the ‘e’ on my first attempt was one cell shorter but this left the number after the last number to be entered greater than 5. This wasn’t acceptable to me as solvers wouldn’t then know whether to round the last digit or not.
    Steve (Xanthippe)

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