My father, you see, was frankly quite gullible. Many years ago he fell for one of these "investment" scams. The scam promised to exactly double your investment every month, and excited by that, my father spent all his money starting such an account. And not only that. He immediately took out two loans which he used to start two more accounts.
To this very day, the scammers had sent him an email every month for each of the accounts, writing out the current balance in dollars and cents. My father in turn had printed all these emails, and these printouts were stacked on his desk.
Yesterday, I had looked at all the printouts for the past 2 years. As you can imagine, the numbers were now so ridiculously large that I didn't bother looking at the dollar amounts. But I noticed a curious property of the amount of cents: Despite the large number of printouts, the number of unique cent values wasn't nearly as large. In fact, there were only a modestly large square number of different values.
Finding this a bit curious, I wrote down the largest cent value written for each of the accounts, and the sum of these three values.
The next day, I had planned to go through the rest of stack. But unfortunately, my husband had thrown it away, junk as it admittedly was. He had spared the first printout for each account though, the one with the balance after the first supposed doubling had taken place.
When taking the cent amounts on those printouts into account as well, I noticed that the sum of the maximum cent amount for each account became 12 cent higher than yesterday.
