An army contingent of 104 members is to march behind an army band of 96 members in a parade.

You can dispose a number of elements in a matrix-like formation with shape if and only if and both divide , and also .

So, we need to find the greatest common divisor between and , so that we can use that divisor as the number of columns, and then.

To do so, we need to find the prime factorization of the two numbers:

So, the two numbers share only one prime in their factorization, namely , but we can't take "too many" of them: has "three two's" inside, while has "five two's" inside. So, we can take at most "three two's" to make sure that it is a common divisor. As for the other primes, we can't include nor , because it's not a shared prime.

So, the greater number of columns is , which yield the following formations:

12.5 feet

step-by-step explanation: