Mathematicians say they now know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop

We still don't know where Amelia Earhart's plane is, what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or who let the dogs out, but mathematicians at New York University say they finally have definitive proof that puts to rest one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries: How many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

Graduate student Jinzi Mac Huang determined the magic number is 1,000, ABC News reports, after figuring that it took that many licks to go through one centimeter of candy, or about half the length of one Tootsie Pop. There was an actual scientific purpose behind this discovery, with the team looking at how fluids dissolve materials. "We realized that is basically what you're doing when you're enjoying a lollipop," applied mathematics professor Leif Ristroph said. "Using that model, we can take an object of any size and kind of a typical flow speed that would be determined by how fast you lick candy, and then determine how long it would take for that to dissolve all the material away."

They did have to stop licking the candy themselves, since they're only human and "resisting the temptation to just bite into one is tough," Ristroph said.

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