Math puzzle: Filling a bath tub with increasingly smaller containers

[jerwin]

Yes. The “You guys need to know your limits” part is what makes it a true math joke.

[sarc]

I still get perplexed at the water bottle measurements in die hard so you better count me out

[McGreens]

I don’t have time for this. I’m going to have a shower instead.

[nimelennar]

Sure, you can completely paint that. At some point, the neck of the horn will become narrow enough that a single molecule of paint will not fit through, at which point, by any reasonable definition of “to paint,” the whole horn will be painted.

Unless you mean the exterior, in which case: good luck with that.

[anothernewbbaccount]

You ‘pour’ containers?
(Who mentioned pouring anything? We are filling a container with containers. The container we are filling is apparently a bathtub, but I did not read that as relevant, per se. Did I misread it?)

@hecep too.

@anotherone. Ah, I begin to see. (Language CAN be a precise tool if used with precision. I also thought it was about filling a bathtub with increasingly small containers.)

“How long does it take if we make our containers smaller and smaller” - about as ambiguous as you could make it. What containers? Containers of what?

“Filling a bathtub with”: well maybe “using” rather than “with”, might have helped. And “using water poured from containers that get smaller and smaller”…even better (but it’s a headline, what can you do?)

[Clifton]

If you think about it as filling a bathtub with containers of progressively smaller sizes (rather than from containers) then it could be worked into a formulation of the Knapsack Problem. That is another interesting mathematical problem particularly because finding an optimal solution is known to be NP-complete.