Experts discover how many licks it takes to get to center of Tootsie Pop

Those that can remember the classic 1969 commercial of a boy asking the "wise" owl how many licks it would take to get to the chewy chocolate center can finally rest at ease. In perhaps the most important scientific study in the past 36 years, mathematicians at New York University have solved the conundrum.

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The answer? One thousand.

Good Morning America reports that graduate student Jinzi Mac Huang determined that it would take 1,000 licks licks to make it through one centimeter of candy, which is about half the length of a Tootsie Pop. This new figure completely shatters the wise owl's shockingly understated estimate of only three licks.

According to GMA, the study was done to explore the effects of dissolving materials within a fluid flow. The data model could be used to estimate the dissolve of rocks in geological environments and pills for pharmaceutical applications, though the lollipop angle was just a fun side effect.

"We used these results to figure out in general how fluids dissolve materials, and we realized that that is basically what you're doing when you're enjoying a lollipop," applied mathematics professor Leif Ristroph told ABC News.

"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," Ristroph said.

Once Tootsie Roll found out that NYU students were conducting the study, they sent them boxes of lollipops for research.

Using the data model, and a giant homemade ball of candy, the students roughly estimated about 1,000 licks to dissolve the candy. However, they admitted they could not complete a trial test with the Tootsie Pops.

"We started to test it, and it's hard. Resisting the temptation to just bite into one is tough," Ristroph admitted.

"How many licks is a question fans of our candy have asked us for decades," Tootsie Roll Industries President Ellen Gordon told ABC News. "We're thrilled that New York University has conducted a study to help find out how many licks it really takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop."