This problem confounded mathematicians of the 1600s/1700s, nearly lived to see its 100th birthday, and brought great fame to its 28-year old solver, Leonhard Euler, who applied new (yet dubiously sound at the time) methods to confront it.

Kevin has a spinner that has 10 equal sections and 2 sections of each color—red, blue, green, yellow, and purple. kevin spins the spinner 180 times. kevin determines about how many times the spinner will land on red or green, and his work is shown below. -kevin has the formula reversed; it should be the total number of sections over the number of red or green sections. -kevin should have used a 4 in the numerator because there are 2 red sections and 2 green sections. -kevin should multiply by the number of sections in the spinner rather than the total number of spins. -kevin calculated the prediction correctly and did not make any mistakes.