Why I'm a Math Junkie

I love math. It was my strongest subject all throughout school and I love it to this day. Recently I saw a brain teaser in the daily paper which reads as follows:

The product of two numbers is 161. The difference between them is 16. What are the two numbers?

Alright, the game is on! You can express the situation like this -
let the 2 numbers be x and y and here are the relations

  x y = 161

    also

x - y = 16

As long as you have 2 equations with 2 variables, you're cool. You just use substitution.

x - y = 16

-y = 16 -x

-(-y) = -(16 - x)

y = x - 16

So,

x y  = 161

x (x - 16) = 161

x**2 - 16x = 161      ( x**2 is computer-ese for x squared, since you can't show the little raised 2 with plain text)

Okay, now I was stuck. Usually these contain just a plain x with no squares. I wracked my brain until I came up with - quadratic equation!! I barely remembered these from school, let alone how to solve them. Time to call in the cheats. Hello Web! One simple search on quadratic equations yielded the answer.

The formula for a quadratic equation is a x**2 + b x + c = 0

So re-arranging the above, you get

x**2 - 16x -161 = 0

where a =1  b = -16 and c = -161

There is a formula for calculating this which I have long forgotten but you can find it on the Web. But just to prove that today's students have it made in the shade, there is a tool that prompts you to just fill in the values of a, b and c and it provides the values of the first x and the second x. I filled in the values a =1 , b = -16 and c= -161 and the two numbers came up as 23 and 7. Here is the sight where I found the answer

http://www.arachnoid.com/quadsolver/index.html

QED