Factorising Quadratics (Meta)

Legendary.

Cool! Is 24A meant to be "/-"?

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think we need more metas that involve math!

Enjoyed it, Ben...super construction!

I got it, by searching on mathematicians, but I suspect there’s some fun wordplay that I haven’t yet considered. I’ll return to the puzzle later today,

Now I have to find the meta-ism! I just asked my daughter Regfish7 the math professor for some names….

I have discovered a truly remarkable solution to this meta puzzle, but unfortunately this text field is too small to contain it.

(Great puzzle, I really enjoyed it! Moar math plz)

Gad. The transcription errors I made! "f-3 = c", "(c-2)(c+4)=8" [rather than "(p-2)(p+4)=8"], "(p-2)(p+2)=8", "p+4 = v", etc.... sheesh!

Great puzzle and I really should have gotten it without so many attempts ("CIOPHAAGUS? Never heard of him but...."). Really great puzzle but tricky. (For the longest time I thought we were supposed to solve for FOCPT which can form the letters of both FOCAL POINT and OFF TOPIC) and the the "/+" was a typo ("We're supposed to ignore the negative value? But then it's zero which isn't positive? Or is the / supposed to be zero? but then the other value is neg not pos?")

Surprised as many have gotten it as there has been.

Great puzzle. (Will never play on prime time, but great puzzle).

Needed a push from lbray53, and the help of Mr. Google to help me re-learn how to factor quadratics, but finally got there. Thanks Ben! All I ask is that you give us a few weeks before the next math puzzle. My head hurts.

Lovely! I will say that the image hint was needed because I was overcomplicating the math(s). I was increasing one SIDE of the square, resulting in an irregular polygon, rather than one DIMENSION of the square.

Incredible meta, wow. Of course, I got through the math part easy, and then I completely fumbled the bag on how to iterate forwards and backwards properly in the alphabet. I was interpreting the +'s and -'s backwards, ending up with something like CHOPEXLRUS. To be honest, though, Chopexlrus sounds like he would have been a pretty bad ass mathematician.

This is incredibly beautiful! Well done, sir! :)

After one wild guess (Pythagoras), I decided to sit down and actually work it out algebraically. It really is more fun to "do the math" if you can. Amazingly clever puzzle.

Inspired construction, Ben, wish you hadn’t given in w the early nudges - I couldn’t resist them and should have wrestled this longer - very cool tho! The one bit of imprecision I was stung by was the notion of lengthening just one side (not two) had me thinking we were stretching into trapezoids, which had me using a lot more Pythagorean theorem than was warranted. Really dug way back deep into my brain for all that… but really, just inspired and smart. Kudos!

Wow - after throwing a couple guesses in, I figured I’d have to do some actual solving - and wow, I’m half amazed that I got to the solution, and half amazed at the construction! Maybe doubly amazed! (Although I only got DIOE_NTUS, struggling with the H and A as I had C+2,-5… )

Lol I did too much math. :) I was trying to figure out how to get letters from just the roots, not the factored equation. Fun, thanks!

Oh (or should I say Doh!), wasn’t doing the full factorising - sorry! (C-2)(C+5)… makes it all so much cleaner, clearer… such a cool meta. Love it Ben!

As someone who does mathematics, a guess for an algebraist appropriate as a meta answer came fairly quickly to me, but I had fun trying to backsolve how to get the meta answer.

Best Meta EVER

This was fun!

can't believe you made us do math... this was genius! i am LEFTSPEECHLESS indeed! the image definitely helped as the "increase one side by #" wording threw me off... if you increase one side by 3, doesn't that side become x+3 and not 3x?

oh nevermind... the math checks out! square with length c... add 3 to one side... you get c(c+3) = c^2 + 3c

Ahh, good one! I had to use the hints on the provided link. I did the math, but then I just kept looking at the solutions to the equations (f = 2, f = -3) and got confused from those rather than looking at the factors in the equations themselves... very nice puzzle! :)

Very late sending in my answer due to lack of computer access this week. Very clever, I figured out the mechanism from the title, the only glitch was trying to prove the order of the letters (which alas I needed nudge #4 to untangle).