Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Thanks again, Keepatit

Thanks, Meursault.

Yes, I did have this 7 as an alternative earlier, but I'd eliminated it for some reason. So Beulah, I agree with you both that the diagonal begins 61798 now.

Thanks so much, and to krauton. Following that link stopped me slogging and made me realise how elegant this puzzle is.

Here is a useful link:
http://nonagon.org/ExLibris/fermat-sum-two-squares-calculator

You can enter the 9 digit number into the calculator and it gives the integers that need to be squared. After that it is just the grid search. I feel a bit of a fool. I didn't check the diagonals when I was looking for the numbers. I hadn't made any mistakes and so otherwise feel OK. Thanks for the comments on this site that showed mewhat I was missing.

Apologies. I see that this link has already been provided!!!

Not much to find entertaining in a numerical puzzle but 16dn brought a smile to my face, anyone else spot that one?

Hi S_Pugh, probably I've missed what you refer to. The only thing I noticed with that clue was that, until I solved 16A, the entry for 16D might just as easily have been 293...

...and just after posting that comment, I realised. Doh !

Funny how it takes a while to spot things sometimes. I've been doing the Mephisto for decades but it was only a year or so ago that I realised that one setter had a 'signature theme' of making the top two across clues link in some way, a theme I recall that was used in the Telegraph concise puzzle on a daily basis. You wonder how many people never notice such things.

Only just finished after a sorting out an error that meant I could not get the second 9-digit number to work. Fortunately I guessed that the highlighted cells might show a particular characteristic, so added the squares of two sets of numbers in the grid and found the sum matched all but the last digit. I'd forgotten to revise the SW corner when I spotted the common feature of the entries about a third of the way through my solve.

I agree that it was a long tedious slog, though the grid is indeed very elegant.

Thanks to those who posted that useful link. I wish I'd visited this forum earlier because that link would have saved me a lot of calculations. However, it helped with the endgame and it'll be useful for double-checking everything.