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I have X,P, through parity and 9d. I have two options each for B, H, T, Y, all linked. Then I'm completely stuck- all the other clues seem to involve too may combinations of letters to be useful. Hint please?

Could you give me some starting hints please?

One of the letters has to be the only even prime, 2. Also, in every pair in a clue ( a/b in reduced form) one of the pair must be even (=2rs). From 12ac, this is X or G, and then from 9d, X must be even, and P must be less than X^2. In any clue with just one letter as a component, that letter must be r+s, since otherwise r^2-s^2 factorises into (r-s)(r+s) which is only prime if r-s=1 ie r=s+1. This gives a way into 1ac, 4ac, 10ac. Then I'm stuck!

thanks for that ... will have a good go at it later!

Took me about 4 hours of solid work to complete.

dylan ... after 10a try 34a ... diff bet Q and V is .... Not many alternatives for the pairs

Then to 5d try some of the alternatives for V ... down to 2 alternatives now for V

Then to 35a

Excellent puzzle. Not as fearsome as it looked if you tackle it in a certain way.

This next bit is slightly off-topic but is to gauge the interest in a couple of projects.

Firstly Zag and I are in the final stages of self-publishing a book of 60 crossnumber puzzles of the type seen in Listener/Magpie. The majority have not been published before, those that have have been in journals. The book should be out before Christmas and would make an excellent gift.

Secondly we intend to start a quarterly newsletter Crossnumbers Quarterly which will contain some puzzles. The launch issue will be free and has puzzles by Arden, Nod, Oyler and Zag so far. If anyone wishes to contribute then email me. If it is a goer then it is intended that there would be a fee.

Feel free to email me regarding any of the above.

I've started solving this crossword, and I have solved X and P from 9D, similar to others, but I'm stuck on how to input the values into the crossword. Each across and down has at least 3 boxes to enter in, but the instructions say to input c from a^2 + b^2 = c^2, while the value I have has only 2 characters... Any hints, or am I just missing something?

Sorry for any confusion, I mean 1 digit/character, rather than "2 characters" for the c value.

alexr - the ratio could be a multiple e.g if the ratio is 5:7 (there isn't one of those by the way)

then the actual a, b could be 10 and 14 or 25 and 35 ... since the ratio can be cancelled down to its lowest form.

I may be wrong but that's how i understand it