Word Problems

By Mitchell Philipp

As a hobby, I like to write humorous word problems. You know the textbook problems that say things like "Jonovan has 37 watermelons in his cart" that make you think more about why the hell Jonovan is buying all those watermelons than about the actual math problem? Imagine that, but taken to the extreme. My word problems can spend a full page of exposition explaining how the situation came about, and then only a single sentence of a trivial math problem. I use these as an opportunity to practice my creative writing within a constrained format. I also have a few slide decks of shorter word problems that I had to make for various classes, which I took as an opportunity to write shorter, more to the point jokes into the problems. Feel free to browse.

Related Rates and Optimization

This is the third presentation of word problems that I made for a math class. This was another review project, so I naturally chose the Calc topic that worked best for writing word problems: related rates and optimization. With that in mind, I recruited some of my friends to write guest problems for the presentation. Highlights: ferrets, a meteor dome, and the SpaceX landing rocket.

Polly's No Meal

I wrote this problem as a creative response to a word problem I had in my AP Calc class. The problem was a pretty basic maximization problem, but what struck me were the strange circumstances of its exposition. It was about a restaurant named Polynomial, which served soup in folded cardboard boxes. I saw that as a little strange, so I decided to rewrite the problem to be even stranger.

Probability 2nd Edition: Now with Extra Beans!

This presentation of word problems was created with the same goal as the previous one, one semester later. This time, I asked my sister what I should write a word problem about, and she said beans. I told her I'd do her one better, and make the whole presentation about beans. This is the result. Highlights: Bernard's Bean Bonanza, the bean lottery, and The Beanch.

Probability and Vectors

I created this presentation of word with the same group of friends as the previous word problem. It was for an end-of-semester review project that we would have to present to the class, so we decided to have some fun with it by making as many jokes with it as possible. This also led to a thirty minute exploration into horse naming conventions, so it was overall a fun time to create. Highlights: The Lunar Fall Olympics, the Grand Master Wheel of Super Fortune, and the horses of Espoo, Finland.

A Purposeful Porta-Potty Purchase

This was the first word problem that I wrote (partially) for fun. It was an assignment to go out onto the high school football field and take some measurements of some object there, then make a word problem out of the measurements we took. I was in a group with my friends Nico, Abby, and Powell. We spent quite a while brainstorming ideas for our word problem, and I spent the rest of the day, during classes, editing those ideas into this word problem.