A fact from 17-animal inheritance puzzle appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 8 July 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the 17-animal inheritance puzzle has variously been stated with 17 camels, 17 elephants, or 17 horses?
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S. Naranan [30] states that a "legendary tale" about Birbal (1528–1586) has him telling the puzzle. I guess this vague attribution doesn't exactly contradict [9] but it seems relevant to the History section.
"Problems of achieving specified proportions using indivisible elements that cannot be divided exactly into those proportions also arise frequently in electoral systems based on proportional representation.[8]" --- this seems to be clearly true but not connected to the animal inheritance puzzle. I understand that in Mathematics, people take many concepts as "obvious" but all the same the link between the instance and the class feels very close to original research.
I was trying to steer clear of OR here, by writing a sentence that stated only clearly sourceable facts (that such problems arise in apportionment) with the only intended implication being that the specific problem studied in this article is an instance of a broader class of problems that have been studied more broadly. The connection is merely that the animal inheritance problem is I think is very obviously a "problem of achieving specified proportions using indivisible elements that cannot be divided exactly into those proportions". The point of mentioning this is that these fractional-rounding problems are not merely a curiosity rooted in archaic inheritance customs or strained metaphors: they are a kind of problem that comes up all the time in other contexts. Do you have a better suggestion for how to handle this? It is certainly possible both to find sources that directly connect the 17 camels (or horses, whatever) puzzle to "fair apportionment" [1] and other sources that directly connect the applications of fair apportionment in inheritance of indivisible goods with the applications of fair apportionment in electoral systems [2] but I think trying to spell this out through such sources would belabor the point and stray farther towards original research. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:07, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I tried swapping out the mathematical sentence and source for a political science source (the one linked second above) and a sentence based more on what that new source says; let me know if you think this is an improvement. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:20, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.