Paige Wortmann

Checker Board Problem Set

Problem Statement
Checkers can grow boring, so Mark and John decided to stop playing and look at the actual
board. It was a 9 x 9 checker board but they argued that there were more. So how many squares
are actually in this whole checker board?
Process Section
When this problem was introduced, one of the first things I thought of was a lady of a talent
show on T.V who did this in an insane amount of time. I know she could not have gotten exact
numbers with just guesstimating, she had to use math in some sort of way. I knew that the whole
checkboard, the whole 9x9 checkerboard counted as one square and went from there.

1 9x9 81
2 8x8 64
3 7x7 49
4 6x6 36
5 5x5 25
6 4x4 16
7 3x3 9
8 2x2 4
9 1x1 1

I came up with this table which shows the possible number of squares in each “row”. This
checker table has a 9x9 grid which has 81 little squares, in 1 box. If you shrunk that into a 8x8,
there would be 64 little squares inside that, which would have 2 boxes inside the total grid. The
list goes on from there and continues until the number of boxes that would fit inside the grid
totals to 9. All that is left to do is add the total numbers of little squares in the given size of the
box to get the total amount.
Solution
My final solution to this problem is that there are 285 squares total in this 9x9 checkerboard grid.
Algebraic Equation
S= x(x+1)(2x+1)/6

This is the equation I thought was correct because x is the total grid dimensions and this equation
could be done with any square grid (with even squares inside of it). The first x(x+1) comes from
squaring the size of the boxes and counting the overall grid. The second term came from the
double of number of boxes you could fit in the grid as it got smaller and of course the overall
grid. The division by 6 honestly came from trial and error.