Math Challenges

We have completed posting the first set of questions! For now we post every weekday, but I may slow that down to once or twice a week in a few months. Daily feels like overkill despite being ten different topics.

Zapwai is posting solutions once a week, but that is not surprising, as he is me. However - big news - our first non-trivial user has joined, and even submitted a few solutions! Thank you to fish-face for joining and sharing some answers.

If these questions seem too easy for you, well, we're basically doing homework questions in order. These first ten questions were each from week one of a course. I am attempting to stick to a sixteen week schedule, meaning the sixteenth question will be the most advanced one in each topic. These are also undergraduate topics, meant to take a few minutes if you already know the material. Now and then they may be more challenging.

Another thought: We don't currently have a plotting system, or a way for people to draw graphs as part of an answer. I don't want an actual graphing calculator, but it might be useful to have some mechanism like desmos or tikz. I may trial something in a few months, there's no rush, but it's on my mind. Some precalculus and calculus questions would benefit from it.

If you have some feedback, questions, or bug reports, please contact me: zapwai+mc (at) gmail (dot) com

I have long been a fan of Project Euler and the Perl Weekly Challenge.

Project Euler is a site that offers challenging questions to programmers and number theory enthusiasts. The Weekly Challenge is a place for programmers to stay sharp with a few tasks every week.

It occurred to me that a "weekly challenge" site aimed at mathematics students could be fun. At first it seemed fairly daunting and I didn't know where to begin.

The website does not validate your solutions, but you can view other user's submissions to see how you did. This allows us to keep some of the questions more open-ended, even something like "prove this result" could be a task.

I'll be posting a new problem almost every week day. (So if you're only interested in one class, that's a new problem every two weeks.)

We post our first problem tonight. Many of these are homework questions from various textbooks, and we'll mostly go in order.

I had a loose plan to mimic a course, posting around 16 questions for a "full semester" before we start over with the stuff from chapter one.

Here are some references:

• Precalculus (3rd) Stitz & Zeager
• Discrete Math - An Open Introduction (4th) Levin
• Calculus (4th) Stewart
• Differential Equations (2nd) Blanchard, Devaney, Hall
• Linear Algebra and its Applications (3rd) Lay
• Linear Algebra (4th) Friedberg, Insel, Spence
• Abstract Algebra - A First Course (2nd) Saracino
• Abstract Algebra (3rd) Dummit, Foote
• Complex Variables and Applications (3rd) Brown, Churchill
• Functions of One Complex Variable (2nd) Conway
• Principles of Mathematical Analysis (2nd) Rudin
• Real Analysis (2nd) Folland