Question

The imaginary monster Dracula is 576 years old, according to legend. Since that very first birthday long ago, when he happily blew out 1 candle on a cake decorated with drippy red frosting, how many birthday candles has he blown out in his whole horrifying life? Assume that Drac has always blown out exactly n candles on his nth birthday.

Answer 1

he has blown out 331,776 candles because 576x576=331,776

Answer 2

The correct answer is
`166176` birthday candles in his whole life.

Explanation:

We know that the imaginary monster Dracula is 576 years old.

We also assume that Dracula has always blown out exactly ''n'' candles on his nth birthday.

If we want to perform the sum from 1 to 576 in order to calculate the total birthday candles we can do the following :

We can write that
`1+576=577` ;
`2+575=577` ; ...

We know that each pair of numbers sum up to 577.

Now, to calculate the total pairs of numbers we need to do the following operation :

`(576)/(2)=288`

We have 288 pairs of numbers that sum up to 577. If we sum them all we will have the following equivalent operation :

`(288).(577)=166176`

We found out that Dracula has blown out 166176 birthday candles in his whole life.