Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 264 posts

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#111

Post by Avicebron »

Auracle wrote: post #92
RC_ITR wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Throughout high school, Kaczynski was ahead of his classmates academically. Placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he soon mastered the material. He skipped the eleventh grade, and by attending summer school he graduated at age 15. Kaczynski was one of his school's five National Merit finalists and was encouraged to apply to Harvard.[17] While still at age 15, he was accepted to Harvard and entered the univers…

There should be some sort of university made for people like that - where they’re learning high level stuff but with people their age.

Bards college at Simon's Rock did something like this. My friend went when he was 15ish. I used to visit during the summers and while the education was relatively accelerated, there are a host of other issues that don't often get brought up with this model.

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#112

Post by SilasX »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #80
jbverschoor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazy writers and/or who get paid per word. The writer can fix the article, or let every reader fix it in his mind.

Maybe just consider that the audience of the article is not you?

The article is not for technically minded people who would like a lucid explanation of the math behind the result? Because they're pretty clearly trying to hit that target, and frequent interruption of that kind of exposition works against it...

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#113

Post by [deleted] »

chatterhead wrote: post #109
Waterluvian wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me, “comparison is the thief of joy.” I’m confident this is a famous quote. But once I heard it, it kept resonating. Then years later I watched Bluey with my kids and mom says, “just run your own race” and it all clicked. I’m so thankful that it clicked because I feel liberated from this self-imposed sense that I need to absolutely maximize my time here, which is an impossible task.

I don't know about mathematics, but in orgies this is absolutely true.

[deleted]

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#114

Post by lern_too_spel »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #77
kevinventullo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the kind of immersion and tutoring that rich parents can buy doesn’t remotely compare to having two professional mathematicians as parents. The tutors for rich kids are likely to be local grad students who meet with the kids at most a few hours a week; you can’t exactly hire a fields medalist for tutoring. Perhaps more importantly, those rich kids are not getting singular training in math, they’re getting tutored…

I bet you could hire a Fields medalist with enough money. Might be a lot, but for sure you can. Everybody has a price.

And if you did, you would surely get results. That isn't really happening at any sort of scale today. Compare to Alexander the Great, who was tutored by Aristotle himself.

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#115

Post by thaumasiotes »

ok_dad wrote: post #43

I knew a guy in high school that carried around a sub-compact notebook and one day in science class we were learning about how to factor quadratic equations (a review of old math we should know) and this guy was not paying attention at all, just typing away. The teacher asked him what he was doing that was so important that he couldn't listen, and to please come up and solve the problem. This kid walked straight up t…

> This kid walked straight up to the board and explained how you can design a computer program to factor any polynomial equation string input to it, and in fact had implemented a polynomial equation factoring program while the teacher explained how to factor simple quadratic equations.

I find this difficult to square with the well-known theorem that there is no closed-form solution to polynomials of degree five or more. (Where a "solution" and a "factoring" are, for polynomials, the same thing.)

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#116

Post by Waterluvian »

chatterhead wrote: post #109
Waterluvian wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me, “comparison is the thief of joy.” I’m confident this is a famous quote. But once I heard it, it kept resonating. Then years later I watched Bluey with my kids and mom says, “just run your own race” and it all clicked. I’m so thankful that it clicked because I feel liberated from this self-imposed sense that I need to absolutely maximize my time here, which is an impossible task.

I don't know about mathematics, but in orgies this is absolutely true.

Semantics.

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#117

Post by nickstinemates »

noir_lord wrote: post #97
wingmanjd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't as cool as this kid, but I wrote a binomial expansion program in TI BASIC back in high school that I was pretty proud of. Teacher said it was neat, but then banned calculators on our tests/ quizzes after I demoed it.

I had a maths teacher who accused me of cheating because we had coursework to solve a particular problem, I solved the problem for that case and then the general case using math she hadn’t taught me even had a pascal program that you could enter parameters and it’d give you the answer. She literally couldn’t get her head around a student going to the library, taking out a book on maths and teaching themselves because…

"Never let school get in the way of your education" is roughly the philosophy my parents raised me on. Precisely to encourage what you had done vs. what school expected.

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#118

Post by THENATHE »

jablongo wrote: post #94
ok_dad wrote: post #43

I knew a guy in high school that carried around a sub-compact notebook and one day in science class we were learning about how to factor quadratic equations (a review of old math we should know) and this guy was not paying attention at all, just typing away. The teacher asked him what he was doing that was so important that he couldn't listen, and to please come up and solve the problem. This kid walked straight up t…

> A computer program to factor any polynomial equation string input to it: Do you mean a program to solve for f(x) = 0 using numerical approximation? Factorization has a specific meaning and is not necessarily possible for quintic and higher-degree polynomials / there is no closed form solution like the quadratic formula for n>=5.

If they’re talking about the quadratic equation, this is likely 8th grade to 10th grade in the US education system. Factoring would be y^2 = 3(ab)^2 + c^2, get y all alone so it’s y = _____

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#119

Post by tambourine_man »

Auracle wrote: post #92
RC_ITR wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Throughout high school, Kaczynski was ahead of his classmates academically. Placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he soon mastered the material. He skipped the eleventh grade, and by attending summer school he graduated at age 15. Kaczynski was one of his school's five National Merit finalists and was encouraged to apply to Harvard.[17] While still at age 15, he was accepted to Harvard and entered the univers…

There should be some sort of university made for people like that - where they’re learning high level stuff but with people their age.

I think you’d still have a problem mixing 7, 12 and 15 year old kids. Perhaps not as much as 15 with 20, but still.

This growing up thing is hard.

Re: Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes

#120

Post by TimTheTinker »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #115
ok_dad wrote: post #43

I knew a guy in high school that carried around a sub-compact notebook and one day in science class we were learning about how to factor quadratic equations (a review of old math we should know) and this guy was not paying attention at all, just typing away. The teacher asked him what he was doing that was so important that he couldn't listen, and to please come up and solve the problem. This kid walked straight up t…

> This kid walked straight up to the board and explained how you can design a computer program to factor any polynomial equation string input to it, and in fact had implemented a polynomial equation factoring program while the teacher explained how to factor simple quadratic equations. I find this difficult to square with the well-known theorem that there is no closed-form solution to polynomials of degree five or mo…

Must have been for degree 4 or below.
Post reply on HN