The hardest problem on the hardest test
A difficult geometry puzzle with an elegant solution. Practice more problem-solving at https://brilliant.org/3b1b Solution to the puzzle mentioned at the end: ...
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Do you guys know about the Putnam? It's a math competition for undergraduate students. It's a 6-hour long test that just has twelve questions broken up into two different 3-hour sessions. And each one of those questions is scored 1 to 10. So the highest possible score would be 120. And yet, despite the fact that the only students taking this thing each year are those who clearly are already pretty interested in math, the median score tends to be around 1 or 2. So... it's a hard test. And on each one of those sections of six questions, the problems tend to get harder as you go from 1 to 6, although, of course, difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. But the things about those 5s and 6s is that even though they are positioned as the hardest problems on a famously hard te...
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Do you guys know about the Putnam? It's a math competition for undergraduate students. It's a 6-hour long test that just has twelve questions broken up into two different 3-hour sessions. And each one of those questions is scored 1 to 10. So the highest possible score would be 120. And yet, despite the fact that the only students taking this thing each year are those who clearly are already pretty interested in math, the median score tends to be around 1 or 2. So... it's a hard test. And on each one of those sections of six questions, the problems tend to get harder as you go from 1 to 6, although, of course, difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. But the things about those 5s and 6s is that even though they are positioned as the hardest problems on a famously hard te...
