Don't fear the Maths

MagneticMonopole · Post by **MagneticMonopole** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 11:34 am

Chapeau!
Creating this challenge must have been at least as hard as solving it!

efe · Post by **efe** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 1:11 pm

The Comic is adapted from XKCD.

Yharaskrik · Post by **Yharaskrik** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 4:52 pm

I totally agree with MagneticMonopole...

I think it's one of the top ten coolest challenges

gfoot · Post by **gfoot** » Mon May 11, 2009 8:43 pm

Yeah. I hated it until I realised I'd simplified the equation wrongly!

tails · Post by **tails** » Mon May 11, 2009 11:52 pm

Ditto - I misread "i" to "2"

therethinker · Post by **therethinker** » Fri Jun 05, 2009 7:14 pm

That was *amazing*. One of my favorites, hands down.

Nice ending, too <3

I had the hardest time with just graphing it! I simplified out the "hard" parts, but I couldn't solve for y. (I don't think the answer would have shown thru even if I did). In the end, I gave up and graphed it in 3D setting a max of 2, which ended up working.

nighthalk · Post by **nighthalk** » Sun Jan 29, 2012 12:47 pm

heh i was stumped for a while until i remembered the original mentioned euler as a hint. fixed up the equation, and started plotting a black/white image for whose that satisfy it.

the eps ^ (huge thing) is also hard to see from images generated by the equation... had to parse it manually to make sure it was a power and not just a esp*phi.

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Wed Aug 28, 2013 12:53 pm

i also finished in the last pitfall, thought the solution was something like delta or euler's triangle!
one of the best challenges of the site! congratulations to Chocoholic for creating it!

Hippo · Post by **Hippo** » Sun Mar 27, 2016 12:15 pm

After getting the TeX source, I have put $$ around it and compiled.
The equation had just 2 points as a solution.

After a very long time (3 months) I have looked at the source code more closely to discover it used LaTeX \frac so I had to add \def\frac#1#2{{#1\over#2}}.

Afterwards it was simple ... I have expected heartsuite is the only possible output, but I have reduced it to
$$
y=|x|+d, d^2+e^{2|x|+d-3}<3, |d|<\sqrt{3}, |x|<{3+\sqrt{3}+\ln 3\over 2}, |y|<{3+3\sqrt{3}+\ln 3\over 2}
$$

And I have switched to java to plot the solution rather to continue analytically.

Adenium · Post by **Adenium** » Sat May 06, 2017 9:35 am

This is really a cool problem. I stuck for a whole day before I realized I was trying to solve the inequality as

Code: Select all

\varepsilon^{\varphi}+e^{-i\pi}

while it is actually

Code: Select all

{\varepsilon^{\varphi+e^{-i\pi}}

[/code]

After that, the solution is just straightforward using WolframAlpha.