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What Is Mathematics?

What mathematics books did Petr, tourist, ACRush, and Egor read?

  • I've read all of their biographies and it keep mentioning mathematics in their early days.. what mathematics are they talking about? Can you list for me some of these topics and recommend some books of what they might have read ? Because I think I've lost faith in all the mathematics I've learned throughout my life.

  • Answer:

    They are talking about good interesting mathematics. Number theory and combinatorics must be the topics they did when they were kids. I don't know what they read ( and it doesn't even matter actually) but you can read problem solving strategies by Arthur and try doing Imo questions. If you cannot solve them all then read solutions. First do that book THEN imo otherwise you wont be able to solve questions. If you can solve 4 out of 6 questions you can be atleast red in topcoder with some practice.

Aradhya Makkar at Quora Visit the source

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How can a person lose faith in math? Math is not faith-based, it's science, not religion. I don't have any personal knowledge of the books read by people you list. However, I suspect that all people who excel in math and programming competitions start with similar topics - numbers theory, combinatorics and probabilities theory, things which are useful for developing algorithmic mindset. BTW, in one interview Petr said that books should be used as reference when you can't solve a problem, not as a textbook. In the same interview he recommends Concrete Mathematics by Knuth et al. as a "good book in Math for ACM preparation".

Mariya Mykhailova

In programming, we mostly use discrete math. If you don't have a mathematical background, i suggest that you read specific topics that might interest you. iam pretty sure that there are a couple of blogs on such topics. The problem with books when you are starting out is that you quickly get bored with all that complicated stuff. on the other hand, reading a blog or a Wikipedia page gives you different approaches for solving the same problem.

Aggrey Muhebwa

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