YC Applicants: What did you put for the "surprising/amusing question"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339657

by rrhoover • 15 years ago

7 18 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm referring to this question, asked at the end of the application:

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

cperciva3• 15 years ago

When I applied to YC a few years ago, I believe I put down that the quadrillionth bit of Pi is zero.

bartonfink2• 15 years ago

Another interesting fact is that the last bit of Pi is 1. It's not difficult to see why when you stop and think about it, but if you tell that fact without the usual mathematical disclaimers (e.g. - Pi doesn't have a last digit in any base), it tends to put people into a funny "how the hell did you figure that out" state.

btilly2• 15 years ago

You clearly don't think in Unicode.

ssp• 15 years ago

I don't get it. What does it mean that the last bit of Pi is 1 when there is no last digit?

ehsanul• 15 years ago

Did you get in? If not, were you invited for an interview?

cperciva3• 15 years ago

PG wrote to tell me that they couldn't accept me due to my inability to move to the bay area. (Which is exactly the result I expected.)

btilly2• 15 years ago

I'm not an applicant, but I know what I'd put. (And the fact that I'd put this probably makes it good that I'm not an applicant!)

In grad school I proved the following:

A polynomial that is symmetric in the roots of two other polynomials is a polynomial in the coefficients of the other two polynomials.

As an example it is easy to construct a polynomial with integer coefficients that has sqrt(2) + sqrt(3) as a root. Just take the polynomial (x-sqrt(2)-sqrt(3))(x-sqrt(2)+sqrt(3))(x+sqrt(2)-sqrt(3))(x+sqrt(2)+sqrt(3)), multiply it out, and you'll get your answer. (In this case, x^4-2x+1.)

Kind of a cute result. So I took it to multiple mathematicians. None had heard of it until I talked to an old mathematician who told me that it sounded like a very old approach, and he encouraged me to look for an introductory algebra book from the 1800s.

I did, and lo and behold! It was once well-known, and a standard part of the undergraduate curriculum. Even better, two of the mathematicians who had not known the result worked in areas of math that STARTED with that observation! (One worked with the algebraic integers - that construction was how mathematicians first proved they formed a ring, and the other worked with symmetric polynomials - and that construction was the original reason why they were studied.)

This incident opened my eyes to the truth of how easily knowledge gets lost, and how little attention mathematicians pay to their own history.

keiferski• 15 years ago

Wow, that's impressive. Well, at least it sounds impressive to someone without a lot of math knowledge.

Which has me puzzled. I can't think of anything offhand that I "discovered". I suppose you don't need to have been the first to discover it; it merely needs to be relatively unknown to most people? If that's the case, then nevermind: I'm full of obscure knowledge.

I've actually "invented" an impressive device, but I'm not sure if "something you invented" is what they're looking for.

Of course, I'm probably reading into this a little too much.

malandrew• 15 years ago

When I was a child I discovered that band-aid wrappers exhibit triboluminescence when opened. I happened upon that by accident and only learned the term for that now as an adult.

petervandijck3• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence

sim0n2• 15 years ago

"We've discovered that even owls don't stay up as late as developers." We tried to go for something simple yet slightly amusing. Not sure if we'll change it before the 20th or not.

petervandijck3• 15 years ago

Did you actually discover that?

Or is this more like trying to answer "what is your greatest weakness" (terrible question!) with "I tend to work too hard"? :)

sim0n2• 15 years ago

It's more of a humorous remark more than something we've really discovered (though spending all day and all night hacking away isn't something that's uncommon for us) which is why I'm not 100% sure we'll be keeping it as our final answer to the question :-)

JoshKalkbrenner• 15 years ago

CoinStar does not accept 1943 5 cent nickels!

But it does help identify $80 nickels.

alexl• 15 years ago

I posted my entire application here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361753

YC Applicants: What did you put for the "surprising/amusing question"?

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