UHME Meeting
I just got back from a UH Math Enthusiasts (aka math club) meeting, and I have to express my dissatisfaction. At both meetings that I’ve gone to (out of three), all the questions raised were either trivial or unclear. Here is an example of the best one raised today:
Let
and
be two consecutive odd primes. Prove that
can be written as the product of at least three primes.
And even that one is not satisfactory; it is precise and sweet, but not very substantial. The majority of the problems we had were of the visualization sort, where the problem is fuzzy and there are as many interpretations of where we’re going as there are people in the room. In general, I like those fuzzy questions, but I don’t think they’re fit for a group of people to work on, unless you really make an effort to limit the problem and specify exactly what you’re looking for.
So I guess my complaint is that we lack the discipline to pose well-defined problems. Other than that, I had fun. Even though the problems were fuzzy, they were still fun to work on, until it became frustratingly clear that we would never agree, not because anyone was approaching it incorrectly, but because the problem was too ill-defined.
And I got a resolution to one of my struggles with the δ function, although not the one I wanted.
Possibly relevant posts:
- UHME: a google group for math problems and discussions (12/18/2008)
- Mathsolve.com (11/6/2003)
- Domain name hassles (4/23/2004)