This puzzle is all over the internet and invariably caries the comment that "even the teachers can't solve it. It took my around three minutes. The comments all massively overthink it.

If A,B,C,D and E all represent different single digits can you solve the following?

ABCDE
A x
--------
EEEEEE

All I can say is that they can't be very good teachers.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale, February 09, 2021 22:21

The A x line should be indented properly but doesn't show up that way for some reason so another way to write it would be

ABCDE x A = EEEEEE

I have the solution.

If anyone else is working on it - a useful first step may be to rewrite the problem as

ABCDE x A = EEEEEE = E x 111,111

and proceed from there. It narrows down the possibilities considerably, A and E being discrete.

I may be overthinking it...

How do we find out the answer? Will you post it, Bob?

I'll post the easy solution later.

Actually let me just give you the first couple of steps...

A can't be 1 because all the digits are different so 1 x 1BCDE would be 1BCDE and that can't be right because all the digits in the answer are E.

Also we know that A x E gives a number ending in E. From that we can work out the surprisingly short number of possible combinations of A and E. (For example E can't be 3 because no single digit number x3 gives a number ending in 3).

Once you have that list it's a trivially easy problem.