It's not your fault, but I've seen similar questions before and I'm not a fan of them as I don't think it offers any insight into anything. It goes actively against the intuition that we shouldn't be setting things with different dimensions equal to each other. You can decide, for any shape (with finite perimeter and area), a unit of length such that the area is equal to its perimeter. In fact, thinking about it - that would be a more interesting interview question to demonstrate why this is true. A quite general question with an elegant solution....
@@jamiewalker329 I do sort of agree, the motivation behind these problems is somewhat artificial. It's fundamentally a fancy non-linear set of simultaneous equations. But yes, it could easily deviate into a problem about units/dimensions etc.
What if we rephrased the question as "find all such triangles where the area divided by the perimeter is one unit length", and you give the dimensions of the triangle in that unit length. I agree with both your points, I think "what is wrong with this question" would make an execellent follow up question leading to your question about finding a unit.
It's not your fault, but I've seen similar questions before and I'm not a fan of them as I don't think it offers any insight into anything. It goes actively against the intuition that we shouldn't be setting things with different dimensions equal to each other.
You can decide, for any shape (with finite perimeter and area), a unit of length such that the area is equal to its perimeter. In fact, thinking about it - that would be a more interesting interview question to demonstrate why this is true. A quite general question with an elegant solution....
@@jamiewalker329 I do sort of agree, the motivation behind these problems is somewhat artificial. It's fundamentally a fancy non-linear set of simultaneous equations. But yes, it could easily deviate into a problem about units/dimensions etc.
What if we rephrased the question as "find all such triangles where the area divided by the perimeter is one unit length", and you give the dimensions of the triangle in that unit length. I agree with both your points, I think "what is wrong with this question" would make an execellent follow up question leading to your question about finding a unit.