Fruit Math / Math With Fruit

About

Fruit Math or Math With Fruits refers to math problems where the variables in each equation are replaced with images of fruits, commonly the fruit emojis, challenging participants to discover which variables belong in the place of the fruits. The trend began on Facebook in 2016 after a fruit math equation went viral and continued to spread over the following years, inspiring the subreddit /r/MathWithFruits in 2019.

Origin

In January 2016, an image of a math problem known colloquially as the "Facebook fruit math equation" went viral via reposts and Facebook shares. The image offers a set of three solved equations with the variables replaced by images of either apples, bananas or coconuts, hiding the numbers needed to reach each answer. A fourth equation at the bottom reads "coconut + apple = banana = ??" and requires you to solve each previous equation and determine what digit the apple, coconut, and banana represent to answer it (shown below). It is unknown who created the image.

The earliest available version of it was uploaded to the Polish website Demotywatory^[1] on January 4th, 2016, in the form of a "demotivational poster" with text that translates to: "as many as 90% of people give the wrong solution the first time. How much did you get?" On January 30th, Facebook^[3] user Lisa Woelke shared the problem, gaining over 172,000 shares, 481,000 likes and 2.9 million comments.

On February 2nd, 2016, a solution to the problem was posted to TheProblemSite^[2] by Professor Puzzler, revealing the final answer to be 16, the full correct equation reading "2 + 10 + 4 = 16" with the fruits replaced.

Spread

Various reposts and variations continued to spread in the following years online. For example, on June 23rd, 2019, Redditor u/gammastraling posted a fruit math problem to /r/theydidthemath,^[4] gaining over 6,100 upvotes in two years (shown below).

On September 7th, 2019, the subreddit^[5] /r/MathWithFruits opened with the intent of sharing original math equations in the fruit-math format. Many of the posts use an ironic phrase along the lines of "98% of people can't solve this" parodying the way you might find these posts on Facebook. The top post using fruit math on the subreddit was posted by u/jfb1337 on July 27th (shown below). The equation represents the Riemann Hypothesis, which has yet to be solved.^[6]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References