Diophantine
Banned deucer.
Hey! I seem to remember a thread by Blazade that unfortunately did not last very long and did not have much participation. Having spoken to many Smogon users, I find that there seems to be quite a few maths students, graduates, or people simply interested in maths, so I thought why not remake this thread :) I want to hear all about your experiences with maths, whether you're a PhD student or a middle/high schooler with an interest in it. Talk about whatever you want.
Here are some questions to help break the ice:
Why are you interested in maths? Do you have any stories that sparked your inspiration? I was always interested in maths without really knowing it. Naturally, I liked things like chess, card games, football statistics and tactics, and the London Underground map, but I found my "maths classes" quite boring unless competition was involved. I thought maths was just something I was lucky to be good at so that I'd be able to get a decent job in the future. There isn't much inspiration for maths around you when you're a child/teenager in an inner city comprehensive school. I always thought I'd be an accountant because "lololol good with numbers". However, when I was 14, my new maths teacher, who was appropriately named Mr. Lemma, inspired me like I never had been before. He introduced me to more interesting things like tricky problems, getting me to come up with proofs of things I had taken for granted like Pythagoras' theorem, and showed me many applications of high level maths in the real world. From then, I dove deep down into the rabbit hole and I am about to start my postgraduate degree this September!
What field of maths interests you? When I was younger, I was interested in Number Theory, Combinatorics and Geometry. The former two were topics that you'd only ever see in competition maths, and so felt as though they had more of a prestige than things like stats and calculus, which everyone did in the classroom. These days, I'm very interested in Stats! I only realised I liked stats because I dislike how people use stats lol. I am really interested in Financial Maths too, after reading about how Jim Simons and co. began the quant revolution, and after working in the industry myself.
Have you competed in maths competitions? I competed in the UK Maths Challenge each year at school, and was invited to the British Mathematical Olympiad several times, which is the following round. I had a lot of fun doing that. I got to the finals a couple of times but was never good enough to get onto the national team. The standards are insane. I always felt that it favoured rich students who went to schools that had the best teachers in the world, whereas students at schools like mine had to grind it out for themselves. I didn't do any at university because I was more focused on internship stuff (and getting wasted)
Can you recommend any books or videos? Solving Mathematical Problems by Terrance Tao is great if you want to try your hand at competition stuff. Physics of Finance by James Owen Weatherall had me interested in Financial Maths. I'm currently reading Chaos by James Gleick. Numberphile have many really good videos on their Youtube channel. Michael Penn, Flammable Maths, and blackpenredpen have loads of good videos too.
I hope to foster a kind of community here, so if you need help with any maths problems or want advice in general, feel free to ask someone here! If there's enough interest maybe we can set up a discord server to help each other out.
Discord server: https://discord.gg/Yv5FvYH
Weekly challenge 1
Here are some questions to help break the ice:
Why are you interested in maths? Do you have any stories that sparked your inspiration? I was always interested in maths without really knowing it. Naturally, I liked things like chess, card games, football statistics and tactics, and the London Underground map, but I found my "maths classes" quite boring unless competition was involved. I thought maths was just something I was lucky to be good at so that I'd be able to get a decent job in the future. There isn't much inspiration for maths around you when you're a child/teenager in an inner city comprehensive school. I always thought I'd be an accountant because "lololol good with numbers". However, when I was 14, my new maths teacher, who was appropriately named Mr. Lemma, inspired me like I never had been before. He introduced me to more interesting things like tricky problems, getting me to come up with proofs of things I had taken for granted like Pythagoras' theorem, and showed me many applications of high level maths in the real world. From then, I dove deep down into the rabbit hole and I am about to start my postgraduate degree this September!
What field of maths interests you? When I was younger, I was interested in Number Theory, Combinatorics and Geometry. The former two were topics that you'd only ever see in competition maths, and so felt as though they had more of a prestige than things like stats and calculus, which everyone did in the classroom. These days, I'm very interested in Stats! I only realised I liked stats because I dislike how people use stats lol. I am really interested in Financial Maths too, after reading about how Jim Simons and co. began the quant revolution, and after working in the industry myself.
Have you competed in maths competitions? I competed in the UK Maths Challenge each year at school, and was invited to the British Mathematical Olympiad several times, which is the following round. I had a lot of fun doing that. I got to the finals a couple of times but was never good enough to get onto the national team. The standards are insane. I always felt that it favoured rich students who went to schools that had the best teachers in the world, whereas students at schools like mine had to grind it out for themselves. I didn't do any at university because I was more focused on internship stuff (and getting wasted)
Can you recommend any books or videos? Solving Mathematical Problems by Terrance Tao is great if you want to try your hand at competition stuff. Physics of Finance by James Owen Weatherall had me interested in Financial Maths. I'm currently reading Chaos by James Gleick. Numberphile have many really good videos on their Youtube channel. Michael Penn, Flammable Maths, and blackpenredpen have loads of good videos too.
I hope to foster a kind of community here, so if you need help with any maths problems or want advice in general, feel free to ask someone here! If there's enough interest maybe we can set up a discord server to help each other out.
Discord server: https://discord.gg/Yv5FvYH
Weekly challenge 1
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