oops -- when I said "figure out in the sense of discover? Sure" I was unclear, but I agree -- that request would be ludicrous. That said, I have full faith th

oops -- when I said "figure out in the sense of discover? Sure" I was unclear, but I agree -- that request would be ludicrous. That said, I have full faith that Gauss would pass that interview. Probably Euler, Tao, Dantzig, and Turing too =P But it's not entirely unreasonable for optimization/OR/ML people. Mostly they have to remember how to construct the right function to find the zero of. Most applications of NR just want to find the zeroes of gradients of loss functions. I certainly am not disputing the silliness... I personally am not good at math at a whiteboard while someone is staring at me. And full disclosure: I remember NR from the picture -- the x intercept of the tangent is (hopefully) closer to the zero than the initial guess.