RE: Mathematical SBI contest #6 Results(2 SBI given away) and Solution of the Equation + Announcement

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Thanks for the SBI!

Way back when I was doing these - check out #brainsteem - I ended up mixing the questions so that some were fairly easy and could be done within a day, whereas others were trickier and were weekly.

As there are so many coders on steem, the computational mathematics questions became popular - similar to Project Euler (sometimes the same but with different numbers!)



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Those are some interesting problems you posted back then. Why did you stop?

I'll soon try the unsolved one. I hope you still have the prize :P

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Why did I stop? I got diverted by other projects, such as what became MAPR and the minnow community that preceded it.

The other issue was that we seem to have reached the saturation point of mathematicians on Steem! Or at least those who wanted to do puzzles. In my mind I wanted to create something like Stackexchange, but that is driven by a lot of students - students we really don't seem to have attracted here!

Now that there are more tools and platforms available, might be an idea to revisit that aim.

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When I came to the platform I was really confused that there were challenges and contest for everything except math and science. One of the reasons I started making contests.

I think you should continue.

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Well, now you know the last person to have tried!!

That's why I gave you some advice on tags. Any questions about how things worked, and didn't work, in the past feel free to ask.

Worthwhile project :-)

My favourite subject I teach is competition mathematics - I used to run a gifted kids club and was mainly maths, logic and random weird stuff.

I don't use my personal account much... maybe if we have 2 of us we may round up a posse! Students... we really don't have students on steem!!

I'll have to check - think I even had a maths trail.

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Well there is one thing I'm especially interested about your past contests:
Where did you get your ideas?

maybe if we have 2 of us we may round up a posse!

What do you have in mind?

Students... we really don't have students on steem!!

That's wrong.
There is at least one student here on steem … and you are reading one of his comments right now.
Also I would guess there are a few more students hiding around here somewhere. We would just need to reach them somehow.
I thought rewards were a way, but you already tried that.
Maybe a high steem bounty would do, but that's too expensive and has a high risk of reaching nothing.
I'm at the moment using @contestkings to reach more people(That's where I used to search for useful contests.). Maybe that'll work out.

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The thing about something like stackexchange, is that the students are the ones asking the questions.

That has never taken off here. Whenever I've tried to open out to Q&A posts it's always those big tricky questions - black holes, infinity, speed of light blah blah - all interesting but way beyond what could profitably be discussed so that people are making some progress in their understanding.

Making the prizes bigger won't work - that isn't the real motivation. On Google+ I had a large group, was also on some F&cebook groups - all the motivations were to solve tricky questions, tricky at whatever level the person was.

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A lot of potentially interested people are in other tags, mainly computational ones, eg #programming #coding #computing #code etc

I even got an in principle agreement to load mathjax, but wasn't on steemit, was the now defunct chainbb forum. Maths is a real PITA to write out - all those little gifs!

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(Edited)

Ideas? Ideas are everywhere! Been doing maths puzzles since a kid.
One good source are all the dozens of Olympiad or national pre-olympiad contests. Often the questions are too hard but can find simpler cases or limit the question and it can still be interesting.

Even from Project Euler, just change the numbers so people have to understand the solution even if they find it online they can't just copy-paste the answer.

School maths seems largely designed for the sciences rather than for uni mathematics, hence why contests have a lot of number theory and combinatorics, both largely absent from school maths.

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