Coffin Problem: A Killer Sum from Soviet Union
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- čas přidán 3. 08. 2024
- Coffin Problem: A killer sum from Soviet Union.
In the late nineteen-seventy, in the Soviet Union, mathematics department in Soviet Universities, namely, the Mathematics Department of Moscow State University which is considered as the most prestigious mathematics school in Russia, was actively trying to keep Jewish students and other ”undesirables” from enrolling in the department. One way they used is to give the students a different set of problems during their oral exam. These problems are carefully crafted to be really hard to solve but with elementary solutions that are hard to find. Any students who failed to answer them could be easily rejected. And these type of problems are later being named as ”coffin problems” or ”killer problems”.
Today, we are going to look at one of the coffin problems to solve which is a killer sum!
Disclaimer: This video does not show support towards Soviet Union from any aspect of political standings or policies. In particular, we do not support racism and this video is presented from a historical point of view rather than from a political point of view.
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⏱Timestamps:
0:00 Background history
0:51 Coffin problem
1:12 Motivation and thoughts
1:54 Telescoping sum
4:39 Outro + Subscribe!
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Disclaimer: This video does not show support towards Soviet Union from any aspect of political standings or policies. In particular, we do not support racism and this video is presented from a historical point of view rather than from a political point of view.
Btw i love Soviet era book 🙂
There's a famous book, "The USSR Olympiad Problem Book"
@@1psi3colourmath thanks 🙂
Would be great if you also solve those rest of the coffin problems you showed us at the beginning ☠️☠️☠️
Sure! Maybe I'll make more videos about them in the future!
It was actually straightforward that we need to use telescoping sum and so I tried to split it into two fractions but then got stuck. The sin(a-b) identity was literally unimaginable.Even if i was told use a trig identity,I would try with cos related identities.
I came up with this idea because I noticed that there are two cosine separated with a minus in Acos a_{i+1}-Bcos a_i =1, that's why this may be related to sin(a_{i+1}-a_i).
Can you solve the problem with the prime numbers
Sure, I'll make a video about it!
@@1psi3colourmath it looka kind of similar to bertrands postulate. Like in the theorem they use the lemma that the product of the primes less than n is less than 4 to the power of n