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"Smart" is vague, but in any case I'm not sure it's possible. For sure I can't.

Here's my anecdata with a very narrow but pragmatic definition of "smart". When I did academic research, there was no correlation between any aspect of the casual conversation I held with students and their abilities in maths and CS theory. N=O(10).

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Can you explain N=O(10)? is N their ability and O(10) the big O notation (flat and low)?

I think the idea is that 'N is on the order of 10 students or so'.

It's stretching the Big Oh notation but it isn't terrible.

I wonder about instead using notation like

N = ~10

> It's stretching the Big Oh notation but it isn't terrible

I'd say it is terrible. O(10) is O(1), and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context (measure of growth to represent a scalar).

Which is also the same as O(1000000000) for which data would have different significance.

f = O(n) makes no sense either. It should be f ∈ O(n). However, notation serves us and we don't serve the notation. People say "Big O" when they mean "Big Theta".

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