Q: If 5=4, 7=5, 8=1 and 26=9, what does 12 equal?It appears that Will has given us a rare puzzle involving numbers. Have fun figuring it out. I'll give you one clue: 23,041=500
Edit: My first thought was that the answer was the number of letters in the number when spelled out in English. FIVE has 4 letters, SEVEN has 5 letters, TWENTY-SIX has 9 letters. But the puzzle creator deliberately threw us a curve ball with EIGHT which is 1, not 5.
Okay, back to the drawing board. As I hinted in the title, this is still related to words and isn't purely mathematical. If you look closely at the English spelling of each number, you'll see there are ROMAN NUMERALS hidden inside.
fIVe = 4
seVen = 5
eIght = 1
twenty-sIX = 9
A: tweLVe = 55And spelling out 23,041 in English --> twenty-three thousanD forty-one = 500.