3. TIL that the most prolific mathematician in history, Paul Erdos, took amphetamin...

TIL that the most prolific mathematician in history, Paul Erdos, took amphetamines for the last 30 years of his life to fuel 18 hour working days. Once he was challenged to stay off the Benzedrine for a month - he succeeded but said “Mathematics has now been set back a whole month.”

I had one as an undergraduate. It was broken up into several phases. An applied problem, a theoretical problem, and then “rapid fire questions”

The computational problem was unseen in advance and you had half an hour to prepare for it once given it.

A list of all possible theoretical problems were given in advance, but you’d get one chosen at random and had to solve it on the spot in front of a black board.

Then the “rapid fire questions” was something they didn’t tell you about in advance, but they’d go through the list of theoretical problems at random and see what you knew, or find a point of failure. At this phase they could amplify the difficulty of the problem if they wanted. It was free form and done to exhaust how much you really knew for a final grade.

The course gave homework, but the grades were never recorded. The only thing that mattered was your performance during the oral exam.

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