Riddle Weekly 2021.11

Riddle Weekly 2021.11

Don't look at us, Wilabroard! We're only three-dimensional creatures.


Welcome again to this week's Riddle Weekly, where we offer up our own squiggles and bits in a (futile) attempt to make sense of the world.

This week's puzzle will begin the public exposition of a series of brain-teasers written during idle moments in my senior year of high school, known collectively as "the Johnnie Problems," for they all feature a character of that name.

"The Johnnie Problems" attempt to fill a void in the land of math puzzlers – the absence of a broader narrative – a human touch, if you will, to lend personality and memorability to entice novices into the otherwise bland and bleak world of "word problems".

Here it begins:

JP 1

Johnnie's evil math teacher gives each member of his hundred-strong class a clear flashcard with a number ranging from 1 to 100, where each number is inscribed upon a blocky rendition of 88. He then asks the class to find the sum of their cards. Someone shouts "5050," and the evil math teacher smiles maliciously and says "That's one sum!"

What's the range of them all?