Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

For more ridiculous math problems I want to submit: The Jewish Problems[0].

These were used when Jewish people were trying to get into grad school in Russia in the '70's. Basically designed so Jewish people wouldn't get in.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

View on HN

Did this cause a toxin like stimulation making jewish students better because they tried to reach impossible goals ?

It happened in music a few times.. people invented techniques and subgenres because they tried impossible things or had below useful instruments.

I doubt it. Those problems are close to impossible to solve for ordinary students, therefore many talented but not necessarily genius students lost the opportunity to get good education. I'm a firm believer that students need to be pushed to stay in their discomfort zone, but Jewish Problems can easily push most students into panic zone.

That's one of the principles of deliberate practice: go just beyond the comfort zone, in the area where you feel a challenge, but an approachable one.

The point of the Jewish Problems is that:

1. They're an entrance exam. They were explicitly designed to discriminiate against otherwise worthy candidates.

2. The key feature of the problems is that they are not difficult because they are an average example of a difficult branch of math. Instead they are easy problems, but they are only easy if you can figure out the correct substitution. Otherwise, they are extremely difficult. In other words, getting good at the problems won't make you a better mathematician, it'll just make you better at passing that particular test.

I was only agreeing with the parent that students need to pushed out of their comfort zone, but just a little. Not a lot like the Jewish Problems were doing.

When the impossible goal is to solve a 10x hard problem in 1x time live during an oral exam, no. But it did have a filter effect, so that the Jewish students who did pass the entrance test were much higher ability than their average peers.

These days Harward denies entry to Jews based on quotas.

These days South African universities deny entry based on racial and gender quotas. They also have racial quotas for sports.

The rest of the world seems okay with this because they still allow them to participate in international sporting events.

These seemed like fairly decent problems to put on a mathematics competition…

Yeah, but absolute hell in an oral exam when applying to a school.

The interesting part of thost problems is that once you learn how to answer one, you can answer almost all of them. Of course, that was the issue, the answer wouldn't be accepted. It was a shame these problems were used in that manner.

> The interesting part of thost problems is that once you learn how to answer one, you can answer almost all of them.

I can't see how that would be true. How would you get the solutions to the others by knowing how to do one of them?

I think the parent comment meant to say that once you see the answer to one of the questions, the question seems easy and simple in retrospect (i.e. the questions are NP hard, in a certain respect).

That's the fact that is usually touted in regards to these questions.

Which is funny because we could say the same about competitions like Putnam, but that doesn't make Putnam any easier. But that's the problems with solutions, they are elegant and obvious, but only after the fact. Competition problems are explicitly created to be like that. These problems similarly, but because they could show a simple solution you can "justify" the racial exclusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com