A worm starts to eat through 10 encyclopedia books because he has nothing better to do. He starts at page one on book 1, and ends on page 100 of book 10. The front cover is numbered, 1, and the back cover is numbered, 100. How many pages did the worm eat?

While many might regard the solution to be the primary goal, we find the process in which one came to the solution to be far more interesting. We will take a brief trip through history and return to the problem after. I will start at some arbitrary point in time, because: 1) I can and 2) it’s usually around the time research on the topic is accepted to have started.