The well-known riddle of the Epitaph of Diophantus, attributed to Metrodorus, is one of the style of simple problem in algebra whose pattern when expressed in contemporary algebraic notation is:
$$x = \dfrac x 6 + \dfrac x {12} + \dfrac x 7 + 5 + \dfrac x 2 + 4$$
This appears in the Greek Anthology Book XIV as epigram no. 126.
The version that appears in the W.R. Paton translation is best known:
This tomb holds Diophantus. Ah, how great a marvel! the tomb tells scientifically the measure of his life. God granted him to be a boy for the sixth part of his life, and adding a twelfth part to this, he clothed his cheeks with down; He lit him the light of wedlock after a seventh part, and five years after his marriage He granted him a son. Alas! late-born wretched child; after attaining the measure of half his father's life, chill Fate took him. After consoling his grief by this science of numbers for four years he ended his life.
Now a large swathe of the problems in the Greek Anthology are along similar lines, not only in the context of working out someone's age (of which there are quite a few) but in a whole raft of different contexts:
- how many students attended Pythagoras's Academy (epigram 1)
- the portions of gold donated to the statue of Pallas (epigram 2)
- how many apples were stolen by the Muses from Cupid (epigram 3)
- how many herds of cattle Augeas owned (epigram 4)
- how many walnuts were stolen during a highway mugging by a posse of pretty girls (epigram 116)
- how many apples were stolen during a similar robbery (epigram 117)
- a more civilised distribution of apples (epigram 118)
- the number of walnuts harvested from a tree (epigram 120)
- how far it is from Cadiz to Rome (epigram 121)
- how large a fortune was squandered (epigram 122)
- how an inheritance was distributed (epigram 123)
- the age of an unnamed protagonist (epigram 124)
- how many children were born to Philinna (epigram 125)
- epitaph of Demochares (epigram 127)
- how many people were killed when Antiochus's house collapsed (epigram 137)
- how Nicarete distributed her nuts (epigram 138)
Clearly these all fit the same pattern: you are given a description of how a number is broken down into a set of both fractions of the whole and one or more specific enumerations, and you are asked to calculate what that number is.
Such a puzzle can be seen in a number of such collections of puzzles (if I'm not mistaken Alcuin includes some in his Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes), but only the Epitaph of Diophantus seems to be well-known.
My question is: is there an accepted name for this classification of problem?
