on june 22, 2014, savant made an error in a word problem. the question was: if two people could complete a project in six hours, how long would it take each of them to do identical projects on their own, given that one took four hours longer than the other? her answer was 10 hours and 14 hours, reasoning that if together it took them 6 hours to complete a project, then the total effort was 12 "man hours". if they then each do a separate full project, the total effort needed would be 24 hours, so the answer (10+14) needed to add up to 24 with a difference of 4. however, this ignores the fact that the two people get different amounts of work done per hour: if they are working jointly on a project, they can maximize their combined productivity, but if they split the work in half, one person will finish sooner and can't fully contribute. this subtlety causes the problem to require solving a quadratic equation and thus to not have a rational solution. instead, the answer is formula_1 (approximately 10.32) and formula_2 (approximately 14.32) hours. savant later acknowledged the error.