Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

TODO wtf is a "totient"? Where else is that word used besides in this concept?

E.g. International Mathematical Olympiad, International Physics Olympiad, competitive programming, etc.

Events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.

Financially backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses (but also passionate teachers who fell into this hellish system), or companies who hire machines rather than entrepreneurs.

The most triggering thing possible is when programming competitions don't release their benchmarks as open source software afterwards: at least like that they might help someone to solve their real world problems. Maybe.

Some irrelevant people highlight that knowledge Olympiads can have good effects, because they are "an opportunity to meet university teachers and their research organizations". Ciro's argument is just that there are much more efficient ways to achieve those goals.

As an alternative way to get into university, this is not 100% horrible however, e.g. the University of São Paulo accepted students from olympiads in 2019 and then again 2023: jornal.usp.br/institucional/usp-oferece-200-vagas-em-mais-de-100-cursos-de-graduacao-para-alunos-participantes-de-olimpiadas-do-conhecimento/?a

Resources to study for knowledge olympiads:

Unlike over non-commutative rings, polynomials do look like proper polynomials over commutative ring.

In particular, Hilbert's tenth problem is about polynomials over the integers, which is a commutative ring, and therefore brings mindshare to this definition.

In this section we collect results about algebraic equations over more "exotic" fields

Generates numpy/fft_plot.svg, the plot of $2\sin (t)+\cos (4t)$ with 25 points and its DFT.

The output was also uploaded to: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DFT_2sin(t)_%2B_sin(4t).svg and added to en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&oldid=1176616763 only to be later removed of course: Deletionism on Wikipedia.

A hard problem ha been found for it, and it was called the "antihydra":

The good:

The bad: everything else. Closed source learning materials + a university-like selection program. Such a waste of efforts that could benefit way more people with more open resources.

meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4889/request-to-keep-an-eye-out-for-promys-admissions-problems asking to remove PROMYS problems from MathOverflow. And it seems to have been mostly accepted. Newbs. Any maths problem should be allowed to be askeable online. There are no fundamentally new problems, copyright takedown is just silly.

Staring from a triangle wave, this explains why we always get the same musical notes:See also: solving partial differential equations with the Fourier series.

TODO: do higher overtones decay faster in time than the base ones?