In tic tac toe, you draw 4 lines, 2 horizontal and vertical to create 9 boxes. What’s the maths for figuring out how many boxes or sections you’ll create by drawing a certain number of intersecting lines

Question

I hope that question makes sense. I’m an adult and maths may as well be a foreign language for me. This is my secret shame.

Anyway, let’s say I have a sheet of paper and I want to draw 4 vertical and 4 horizontal lines, how do I figure out that I will actually get 25 squares without counting?

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

Multiply. 4 lines makes 5 sections, just like in tic tac toe 2 lines make 3 sections. So just add 1 to the number of lines and multiply cause you will always have +1 extra section created by x number of lines. In the case of tic tac toe, (2+1)*(2+1) = (3)(3)

For your other example, (4+1)*(4+1) = (5)(5)

asterisks messed up my post