The Viral 'Cubes On The Trailer' Math Problem Explained

It's been 0 days since the last mathematics-based piece of engagement farming on social media, as Twitter once became the site of a bloodbath born of a brain teaser. Thankfully, this time, the cause is not PEMDAS semantics and is instead what appears to be a straightforward multiplication question with wiggle room to challenge a viewers' assumptions.

What Is The Viral 'Cubes On The Trailer' Math Problem?

Take a look and see if you can solve Twitter's latest viral equation.

With the information given, it seems like the amount of cubes on this trailer is 51. The bottom layer appears to be a 3×7 line of cubes, the second 3×6, and the top 3×4. Thus, 21+18+12=51, easy peasy.

But are we sure that those figures are correct? This is the debate that's been raging on Twitter, as several have pointed out that there's no guarantee in the puzzle that every layer has 3 cubes, as we don't get a diagonal view of the cubes, so it's possible that the cubes could be arranged misleadingly. Some Twitter users provided diagrams illustrating how there could be significantly fewer than 51 cubes on the trailer.

So, perhaps it's a question with no answer, and the original poster (user @Rainmaker973) seemed to revel in the fact they'd successfully baited some debate in the replies.

Why Are Some People Mad About The Problem?

The crowd who insisted the question had no real answer came up hard against the crowd who insisted the assumptions made to come to an answer of "51" were valid. Surprisingly, this got very heated in some cases, with some going so far as to say LGBT users were more likely to come up with "51" than others.

Perhaps due to the inundation with such debatable math teasers and the perceived smugness of the "well, actually" crowd, some users expressed that they'd had enough debating what could reasonably be assumed to be a simple math problem. The term "Midwit" was thrown around liberally. One user had a particularly popular take when they asserted that the people who were coming up with alternative solutions to the problem were bad at their jobs. Others made memes about the search for alternative solutions.

Whether or not there is a real solution to the problem remains up for debate, but it seems more clear that social media could do without troll-y math problems for a while.

For the full history of the cubes on the trailer problem, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.