"You have 100kg of potatoes, which are 99% water by weight. You let them dehydrate until they're 98% water. How much do they weigh now?
The surprising answer is 50kg"
The above problem is known as "Potato Paradox", a mathematical calculation that yields a counter-intuitive result.
Who would have thought, by dehydrating the potato from 99% of water by weight to 98%, the potato would lose half of its weight (from 100kg to 50kg).
It took me a while to really comprehend this mind-boggling example of an otherwise ordinary looking mathematics problem. But further calculations that were done to explain this paradox prove that this is indeed true.
Mathematics is insane. But that what makes it beautiful.
