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I'm a working mathematician and would need a non-trivial amount of thought to get any of these problems. I was also pretty poor at this kind of thing in high s

I'm a working mathematician and would need a non-trivial amount of thought to get any of these problems. I was also pretty poor at this kind of thing in high school and college, but fortunately the skills involved are almost but not quite disjoint from what is needed to do research on math.

novok 7y ago
What are the working skills needed for research in math?
nopinsight 7y ago
I know some students who excelled at this kind of problems when they were in elementary school and now possibly on path to be good researchers in math and theoretical CS. One is doing math PhD at Harvard; another received a PhD in theoretical CS from Berkeley with stellar track record (over 20 papers when he graduated after just 4 years in PhD--many/most in top venues, as well as perhaps the most prestigious best paper award for CS Theory PhD student when he was in 2nd year). Not all went on the research path though; some are working in applied software engineering. A few who did math undergrad degrees at places like MIT but I'm not sure where they are going next. Another conspicuous example: Terrence Tao was also the youngest ever International Math Olympiad gold medalist (he won it when he was 12-13!). There appears to be a significant correlation between subsets of people who are good at certain types of math and theoretical CS research and at solving this kind of problems when younger. I read that there are mathematicians who focus on solving problems and those who build frameworks. Perhaps the skills for solving these problems are closer to the former?