Please Review And Comment On This Puzzle I’ve Devised
I send out a monthly newsletter to software developers and as part of the newsletter I attempt to include a puzzle in each edition. I would not consider myself much of a puzzle-master but I do try to come up with original puzzles each month. For the November newsletter I was thinking of sending this puzzle:
It happened a while ago that a census taker was proceeding along a street gathering census information. He finished with number 19 and moved on to the next house. A lady responded to his knock on the door.
“Good afternoon Ma’am. I’m gathering information for the census. Can you please tell me the occupations of yourself and your spouse?”
She responded: “He is a postman. I am a professor of mathematics.”
“Oh, I have some background in math!” said the census taker. “Do you have children?”
“Yes we do!”
“How many of each?”
“If you factor our house number, the larger factor is the number of males in our home and the smaller factor is the number of females (including me) in our home!”
“Excellent! Thank you so much for your time ma’am!” He took a moment to look at the next house to be counted and jotted down both the number of males and females in the math professor’s home.
How many daughters live in the home?
I was hoping for some feedback from the folks here. Is there sufficient information to solve this (I believe it’s called a “minimum information”) puzzle? Any wordsmithing you might do on this? I can share my solution as well; I want to ensure that I haven’t come up with an incorrect solution to the problem I’ve posed 🙂
Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated!