Britain's Toughest Exam
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- Cambridge math tripos past papers: www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad...
The 2022 paper shown in this video: www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad...
1841 paper: play.google.com/books/reader?...
Hardy's speech: mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk...
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Timestamps:
0:00 - The Mathematical Tripos
0:39 - Modern day paper
3:04 - 1841 paper
5:42 - Then vs. now comparison
7:12 - Criticism
9:24 - Phillipa Fawcett
10:25 - Patron Cat of the Day - Наука та технологія
Just a very small point indeed but I loved the instruction at the start of the 2022 paper "Write legibly; otherwise you place yourself at a grave disadvantage."
Very British humour.
@@shastasilverchairsg I know it's taken as humour today, but back then the author might have meant it with no humour.
@@oatmongen4263 "Back then" was last year. The instruction is on the 2022 paper 🙂
@@prh47bridge Oh.
That was a bit silly of me.
@@shastasilverchairsg Why is it humour? It's just good advice.
4:32 "There are 12 papers to be taken, 2 a day, for 6 days"
That part I could just about follow
They should make it an exam question:
If each student must sit 12 papers, 2 papers per day, how many days would each student take to sit all assigned papers? [Note: do not use differential calculus in your answer.]
I can get from my house to senate house without a map. But after that it would all be down hill. Fortunately they don’t make you sit the maths tripos in order to work at the university! You’ll be glad to know I have nothing to do with numbers.
@@vk2ig So if you fail another 6 days of 5 hour exams again
2 by 6 equals 12 ?.
@@liamhickey359 That's one of the exam questions. 😊
I have no comprehension of literally anything that's being spoken of here. But the way Tibees explains it is hypnotic as hell. I love it, even if it makes me feel like the dunce in the room lol
At least you don't have to pose with a giant wooden spoon. 😆
It's called ASMwhatRyoutalkingabout?
@@AshleyStewart1 he looks so proud and so would I be lol. He still passed the exam, and got some decent banter out of it
👍🏻 I agree
You are all overthinking it , she is just explaining basic mathematics concepts. Nothing more , nothing less.
Hardy's comments really resonated.
I used to joke that it was only after I had graduated that I finally had the chance to build any understanding!
Me: still revisiting stuff I really only half understood in my physics from thirty five years ago!
yup, i'm planning on consolidating my understanding only after graduation
@@graememorrison333 Ha ha, same here. Started reading old maths text books from the beginning, at my own pace, at the start of the pandemic, and suddenly it's all starting to make sense.
I'm not from maths, but I've supervised some chemical engineering modules for undergrads as a PhD student. The tripos exam questions can appear overwhelming but, with enough practice, are certainly manageable. The trouble is, students have so much going on in their course -- supervisions, courseworks, computing classes, etc. -- that it can be really difficult for them to find a good learning pace.
I just did Part III last year. I came from another university and joined in the 4th year. It was honestly the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life. My average dropped from 95 percent to 70 percent.
well done, I think that's still a distinction! I wasn't good enough for part III. I went on to do the now defunct diploma in computer science.
Dude, that’s so good! Congrats, pal!!
Hey Jarah, it was rough for me too, but a 70 is still fantastic. It's an achievement to have just made it through in one piece.
You've got a big brain, most people couldn't even hack a bottom tier maths undergraduate degree.
I already knew that I was at my mathematical limit when I started Part III... As I had decided not to continue to a PhD, all the stress melted for me, though. It's a really interesting course going through current research topics - basically a shop front for picking your research area. I did pass the exam (probably I was a 40 percent student though!), but if I was under the pressure of wanting to continuing on to research, it probably would have broken me.
Thank you very much 🙏
You are making the world smaller and providing access to various knowledge which many(including me) wouldn't even know available.
Happy New Year Toby. Your videos are terrific. Makes one's mind think. Thank you. 👍
Thank you for another fascinating video!!! I was particularly impressed by how meticulously you have researched this topic and not succumbing to the plethora of myths that exist, and how you have presented everything in the most intriguing way!!! Looking forward to more of your videos in the new year!!!
That was a really nice video, thanks. My 2p worth (my background is that I took the Tripos and have taught undergraduates at Cambridge) is that the exam is actually pretty good now, and probably very unlike what it was 100 years ago in Hardy's time, or earlier, when you had to "put your mathematical life on hold" to do extensive speed training for a narrow form of questioning.
IMHO the exam today does incentivise you to actually learn the syllabus material, which I think is the main merit of an exam - more important than classifying people at the end. And the syllabus material is good: if you understand it then you should have a good grasp of the subject.
Most Tripos exam questions are of a certain form. They will first get you to state some piece of theory and maybe do something relatively straightforward with it, then they will ask you a more problem-solving-type question that relates to it to see if you've understood it more fully.
I love that you're exploring different countries' tests. Will you look into french exams in the future?
Your videos never fail to intrigue me. They are so well made a thought out. Thanks for the great content and keep up the amazing work!
Si. Esattamente come Karrie ldd 88 . It's a coaching.
I love these vid's, hope your well Tobi and wishing you a great new year.
Thankyou TIBEES for such a amazing video
Please keep them comining, this content is gold.
Keep up the informative videos, Toby 👍
Thanks for sharing ❤️❤️❤️
Love the content. Thank you. Just shows how competitive old schooling system was. And the one and only goal for a successful candidate was a university professor.
Great piece of history. Nice work.
Having recently played around with Bezier curves for the first time, I felt very clever when Tibees asked "What is a convex hull?"
Granted my answer would most probably be deemed inadequate, but still!
Thank you ma'am for the information 🙂🙂
@Tibees, at 0:14 you mention that the tripos comes in three parts. Those parts (for the mathematical tripos) would be Part I, II and III. Part I is split into IA and IB as you say and each run over one year. Thus Parts I and II run over three years and constitute a Bachelor's degree. Part III is optional and comes as the fourth year of the mathematical tripos, which constitutes a Master's degree. Different subjects may have a different partial structure to their corresponding triposes. This is clarified on the Wikipedia pages for Tripos and Mathematical Tripos.
ISTR that, originally, the term "tripos" is a reference the three-legged stools on which students traditionally sat.
Hello, you should take a look at the ENS Ulm maths entrance exam. Its difficulty would probably dwarf everything you've ever presented.
Another interesting thing about the current tripos is the way that the marks are calculated (it involves 3 kinds of marks and different inequalities for different grade boundaries)
It's the toughest undergraduate Mathematics course in the World, not just in UK. The arguments against it are cogent and reasonable, but the bottom line is that many, many Cambridge Mathematicians consistently win the Fields medal and are usually in the top 1-5% greatest mathematicians of their respective generations. The Mathematics dept' at Cambs must be getting something right?
That's impressive
I think Michael Atiyah might have come first on his.
Toby's Video features some of the wealthiest colleges in the world. Trinity college is said to have been UK's largest land owner only after the government and the church. At one time you could travel from Cambridge to Oxford solely on land owned by Trinity college Cambridge.
Excellent video!
Did my final year computer science exams June 2022. I spent the grueling revision months leading up to it in the library with a few friends, one of whom did maths. They hated their tripos for the exact reasons Hardy described: no time for genuine exploration of ideas, and a horribly gameified marking structure. (Compsci was similarly not great, but not as bad as maths.)
As an example of marking: questions are marked out of 20, if you get 15 or more then you get an 'alpha', netting you about 30 marks extra iirc. What this means is you can slightly mess up on a question, getting 14 marks, and miss out on more than tripling your marks. This crazy discontinuity is unnecessarily stressful and can be the difference between failing and getting a first for a very small incremental effort.
@@benmandrew I'm still in first year of the maths tripos, but I already have a feeling that alpha and beta marks are gonna become the bane of my existence. Our DOS was trying to explain them at the matriculation dinner, and eating a fancy meal, dressed up in gowns, while discussing the technicalities of maths examinations is still the most 'Cambridge' thing that's happened to me so far this year lol
@@malignusvonbottershnike563 There are proposals to smooth out the sharp transition between an alpha quality solution and a beta one. I think that proposal has a lot of support. Reform of Part II more generally is under discussion though there are some disagreements on the best way to proceed.
@@benmandrew I got a first in Lit Hum at Oxford - I am sure I would not have got one at Cambridge. One of my papers is even had a γ grade (my expertise in latin and greek i think actually declined while i was at oxford). It was just fortunate that I wrote one of the two best papers that year in schools in what I really loved studying- that was philosophy of language, semantics of natural language, the debate between realist and intuitionistic mathematics etc. (One of my teachers said that I was a monomaniac!)
I graduated fourth year in computer science last year, can agree Compsci wasn’t completely awful but still very tough! However looking at my mathmo friends’ papers gave me minor heart attacks each time I’d go in to chat!
The mechanical sciences (aka engineering) tripos in 1970 had 10 3 hour papers over five days - Monday to Friday. 6 hours of exams every day for five days in a row was quite tiring.
That doesn't happen these days (when I took the maths tripos, I would have four 3 hr papers over two days). With some students being allowed extra time, it has become impossible to schedule exams in the same way that you and I were used to.
@@0cgw Massive respect for someone who passed the maths tripos. At Trinity the maths guys were considered to have superior brains. I did double maths and physics at A level. I started to find maths difficult at third order PDEs. Until then it had been something like "that's obvious. What else could it be?"
We got practise at taking exams. Starting in first year, we had two sets of exams every year - one before Christmas and one before the summer break. Each one had multiple 3 hour exams. I think that it was 10 * 3 hours each time. Fail one paper and you were out. Gone. As in don't come back next term.
This still happens, at least in my subject (Natural Sciences), depending on what combination of modules you pick. That one week of exams determined the vast majority of our final grade for each year, so there was a lot of pressure.
Hey Tibees, Loved the video. Could you make a video about Scottish Exams especially the "Advanced Higher Maths" taken by highschool students 👍
Oh yeah I had to use the Navier-Stokes fluid mecanics equation in my exam this year. Funny to find the Stokes name in this video indeed. This channel looks great by the way.
Terry Pratchett must've known about the Senior Wrangler title, given the same title at Unseen University in the Discworld books.
Why do they use so many different font styles in sentences? And the paragraphs make it even harder to read. Just my opinion.
in maths it’s customary to denote things like sets and some vector spaces and the expected value function with blackboard font (the letters with doubles lines) and other objects to be written in cursive, so i hope that explains the font styles
Ah, this takes me back. Interesting to see how the syllabus has changed since the 1980s. I remember grades being read out in the Senate House (it only happened in maths, not other subjects, where the class lists were pinned to a noticeboard). I'm not certain, but I believe tghat tradition is no more because of GDPR data legislation. I think nowadays, you only find out your own class, and not everyone else's - you only fid out someone else's grade if they tell you. So the reading in the Senate House, I believe, no longer happens. Part III, the optional 4th year, is a huge step up from Part II. I passed it, and that was a minor miracle!
At Oxford the noticeboard malarkey is still in place
Great job, guys 😂😂
I did that in the early eighties. Great to find out more about it.
thanks for your way to put talent and performance in debatable perspective
You can take a look at the hardest french maths exam : Maths D ENS ULM. I think It's the hardest maths exam in the world for people with just two years of post-highschool studies. It's a special exam to enter ENS ULM in Paris (école normale supérieure), a very little university which has produced thirteen Fields Medals.
Very informative and nice channel
You should also take a look at the defunct Cei part2 endineering papers. These were set at degree level but were set and assessed externally.
Thanks!
6:14 i thought i recognized the name! i believed stokes shift in fluorescence spectroscopy is named after him as well.
Everything she says goes above my level of comprehension by far, but her voice and speaking is so soothing!
Lol!!!!!
Any tips for acoustic geometry? I've been counting vibrations per second and looking for patterns.
Thank you...Good clip....
Excellent report.
Could you say a few things about probability theory and maybe discuss the central limit theorem, and why didn't the central limit theorem appear earlier, and when had mathematics progressed far enough for the central limit theorem to have appeared.
Also, do you have a Germanic relative in your heritage ?
Your voice is very soothing.
So now I know why there is a Philippa Fawcett Drive on the West Site in Cambridge. Thank you!
Great videos
These insanely obscure and difficult questions read by Tibees are perfect background noise while I do my Entry Level College Statistics homework :)
I have a tough question: how many ways can I map 5 equidistant points onto the 16 faces of a hypercube?
Amazing how a pure person can just be themselves, and people just flock to their presence in admiration.
Your social media posts are so very interesting. Thank you for your efforts. I think it would be great to be friends with you socially. Keep up the good work!
5:12 - Reminds me of the time when I got my only D... Which was when the class averaged an F per the "usual" cutoffs. Wonder if it's kinda standard for higher math exams?
Dear Tibees
All the Work you have done
Has Transcended Math and Physics
You are an Angel on this Earth
Thank you for your Magnificent Effort
I Hope you will Always have
A Happiness in your Life
Take Care my Friend
Thank you
Take Care
Makes me feel proud to have got my degree from there. Interesting to see the new courses that weren’t available when I sat part II.
How did you find it overall?
I remember writing cambridge primary checkpoint exams it was so difficult and tricky.
Great video
Hardy sums up exams nicely. Also bear in mind that a good examiner can test understanding over rote by clever question design. Alas, many examiners are stuck in a one time mindset and set the same style year after year and, in my experience with English maths papers, they keep those posts for decades .. groan. If you want to see questions that are a little more probing but far more fun, look at the UKMT challenge papers.
There was a tale about a history professor who was criticised for setting the same question every year, and his response was that it didn't matter, because they changed the answers.
Great video.
I got as far as learning trigonometry before I reached my limit in math. This material is well beyond my comprehension.
Would be quite interesting to study history at a university like this, you're very much surrounded by it and the the research you could do would be endless.
In theory, yes. Cambridge is a sea of tranquility surrounded on all sides by history. Sadly, it’s also one of the wokest universities in Britain, which means the choice of permissible research topics is heavily circumscribed. Not as bad as most Ivy League colleges in the USA, however.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 you sound goofy
@@vilteb4701 ??? My teeth are very straight.
@Retired Bore - Trinity College on its own has garnered 32 Nobel prizes, more than many European nations.
One of the arguments against a high-pressure exam like this which students take a year or two to prepare for is that it uses up the best years of their lives when they could be getting to grips with the growing points in their field. It seems that no one discovers (or invents) anything really ground-breaking in pure maths much after the age of 25: so a Senior Wrangler has limited time to do his stuff.
Other countries have this sort of exam, calling for expertise in quickly answering trick questions, placed at the entry point to engineering courses in India and China and for the Grandes Écoles in France. As most candidates fail to get through, it's a great waste of time and effort for them. Unfortunately academics gain prestige from keeping people out, which is not what we need them to do.
This is either serendipitous beauty or very well studied production. How can she smile like that hypnotic either way ❤
I am but a med school student, but exams are destroying my life continuously due to the enormous stress they impose, as well as the fact that they really do stagnate any path to personal growth. When you are faced with an exam as difficult as Tripos, you are NOT thinking about learning things or showing your mettle, you are thinking about just passing that exam.
I would argue that G. H. Hardy had hit the cigar with his opinion on Tripos.
I think the stress is part of the point. If you can hack the exams you should manage pretty well in real life.
At least for medicine, fact-retention is significantly more relevant than in more creative/theoretical degrees, so examinations (I feel) are more relevant to the actual requirements of the job.
I'm currently studying Engineering and the exams feel completely irrelevant to the work. I understand the necessity for knowing the maths/physics/chemistry fundamentals, but the questions are always phrased from the perspective of maths/physics/chemistry rather than engineering.
i.e. "Use laplace transformations to solve the following second-order resonant ODEs"
It's a maths question that's relevant to my overall understanding, but it isn't applied to any real world situation, so if I encounter a future situation in my future job where I may need to use a laplace transform then the exam questions haven't tested me on making the connection between problem->laplace. It's not a very good example, but I feel like this is probably a shared situation with a lot of different degrees.
Now that google exists and software can and will do the majority of heavy lifting in calculations, surely the ability to identify the process of solving an overall problem is far more important than the ability to just solve individual equations. Yet exam questions seem to focus primarily on the latter.
Anyway, rant over. I've just finished my exams so I'm angry 😂
@@sirrathersplendid4825 False. Being responsible for a ward of patients is an entirely different type of stress
@@caryoulwhitty - My hat’s off to you either way. A very difficult job. Remember the stress of uni exams acutely. Always thought, surely there’s a better way…
Your voice is so ridoncolously soothing 😴 and I mean it in a good way
that real analysis question was way harder than anything I had to do for my real analysis classes.
I checked out the 2022 Tripos Part 2 paper. The only things I understood were 1) what the questions in Section 1I Number Theory were asking for (expand sqrt(29) into fractions, and solve for x and y in x^2 - 29y^2 = -1); and 2) come up with the mathematical equation that produced the results displayed by the two questions with the R code. Everything else is Greek to me.
Hey Tibees , can you start a playlist that is helpful for startup ceo in innovation field, statistics, algebra, algorithm etc? Can you suggest what do I need to read ? I'm currently doing research along with my engineering and my startup.
I like the way you speak, so calming….
Please Give Me a Sequence of Book List to Learn Physics From Scratch to Advance (For Example : What is Physics ?) 🥺
Why will anyone take themselves through this....its like mental torture 😫
James Maxwell was Secoind Wrangler in the Tripos, beaten by Peter Guthrie Tait who went on to be a professor of mathematics but no-one outside a small group has ever heard of him. Hardy wanted to do away with the Tripos. There has been a little industry in coaching for the Tripos going back to the 19th century.
Can you please make a video about the Romanian graduation exam in Maths? In 2012, more than half of the graduates failed to pass that exam. I'm curious what you think about it.
1:40 “show that the closed universe cannot expand forever” 😂😂😂 aight yeah lemme just become a god real quick
10 days until I find out if I have been offered for a place to do the mathematical tripos at cambridge :( perfect timing!
Hi Tibees, I wish you can have a look at Malaysian UEC higher mathematics syllabus. it is a secondary school syllabus.
This exam is not letting you memorise math but prove the formulas you claim to know.Difficult but immaculate.
I took this in 1993. Hardest thing I've ever done, to this day.
Interestingly, the "describe the ... method" or "prove the ... theorem" are, in my opinion, easier, as you can memorise the answers in advance!
Yes, those are questions that involve knowledge in your answers, so by studying the answers you will be advantaged
Some of the questions were quite difficult, but at least the one on Automata and Formal Languages (at 1:13) was pretty straight-forward. The first questions are just basic definitions, and as for G1 and G2, they produce almost the same languages, except that G1 can produce an empty word, whereas G2 cannot. You can see the equivalence by noting that in G2, X and Y just produce single letters, so you can replace the X's and Y's with a's and b's. Then, replace Z by Ta, and you get S -> aTa | bTa, T -> Ta | Tb | c, which is nearly the same as G1, except for the e (empty).
I understood some of these words
That question’s from the first section which are meant to take 10 mins or less. The second section’s where the harder questions and most of the marks are.
Did 1st year cambridge maths exams couple of months ago. Flopped it and felt like crying… most stressful moment of my life bar none
same same cam is way stressful :(( good luck this year!
we're friend
Just practice and take your time, I hope you get the support you need. University mathematics is not like secondary school/college mathematics, it can quickly become a beast and you need to tame the beast. I recommend looking into useful textbooks/research papers and just grind problems, keep on writing a proof/theorem until it makes sense and find real world applications of those proofs/theorems to see why it works and how it can be applied. Another thing that helped me is using a programming language to do maths and investigating numerical methods.
I didn’t go to Cambridge, but I know your frustrations and can relate to you. You will pull through, all your hard work will be worth it I believe in you.
@Thawne could u elaborate? i'm not sure i know what u mean
@Thawne just read over notes and do lots of past papers i guess :00 are you a first year? :))
Such exams are useful for testing what knowledge was gained, and to check understanding of principles, topics, and mathematical rigour by asking for proofs to be derived, but beyond that it does not help the student to necessarily THINK independently, form new and interesting concepts, apply what they learned to new problems, or even challenge the status quo.
One thing I found as a student of mathematics is it helped me to think analytically about problems and problem-solving, but it didn't turn me into a mathematical genius. I wouldn't even consider myself average, and studied as a "mature student" for my own interest/benefit rather than for the purpose of obtaining a job requiring heavy use of advanced mathematical concepts.
IMHO, the people who go on to be the "heavy weights" in such disciplines were already destined to do so, regardless of their academic background.
Your voice is so soothing
I solved section 1
To compute the continued fraction expansion of V29, we can use the following algorithm:
1. Set a_0 = floor(sqrt(29)) = 5.
2. Let x_0 = 29 and y_0 = 5.
3. For each integer k >= 1, compute a_k = floor((sqrt(x_{k-1}) + y_{k-1}) / (x_{k-1} - y_{k-1}^2)).
4. Compute x_k = (x_{k-1} - y_{k-1}^2) / a_k and y_k = a_k * x_k - y_{k-1}.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until x_k = 1.
The resulting continued fraction expansion of sqrt(29) is [5; 2, 1, 1, 2, 10].
To find integers z and y satisfying a^2 - 29y^2 = -1, we can use the theory of Pell equations. The fundamental solution to this equation is (a, y) = (5, 2). The general solution is given by:
a_n + y_n sqrt(29) = (5 + 2sqrt(29))^n,
where n is an integer. Therefore, we can find z and y by computing:
a_n = (5 + 2sqrt(29))^n + (5 - 2sqrt(29))^n / 2,
y_n = (5 + 2sqrt(29))^n - (5 - 2sqrt(29))^n / 2sqrt(29).
For example, if we take n = 2, we get:
a_2 = 169, y_2 = 39.
Therefore, the integers z and y satisfying a^2 - 29y^2 = -1 are z = 169 and y = 39.
I'm sorry. But the correct answer was, yellow.
I would like to watch you solving an ITA (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica) problem, it's considered to be the hardest exam here in Brazil, just as MIT, JEE, etc. There are some very dificults questions in it of math, physics and chemistry. physics is the hardest one. I never saw no one out of Brazil talking about ITA so that's why I'm asking you. There is also IME (Instituto Militar de Engenharia), witch is very similar to ITA, very hard as well.
Thank you.
I failed it...wait no, that was my highschool GCSEs
Tobi, I hope you'll talk aboutf the notoriously difficult Lev Landau's "Theoretical Minimum" test for young theoretical physicists. I believe they had to pass this test to start a doctorate in his department.
And also take an exam at one of the elite french institutions the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Ecole Polytechnique.
"Prestige" should not be used as the basis for any decision.
The casual picture of the wooden spoon lolllll
So many ppl have commented on jre shorts about the bee lady's voice but Tibees has the MOST soothing voice I've ever heard.
Tibees or Eric Rosen are my go-to bedtime channels… If I fall asleep listening to them I somehow seem to wake up smarter 😅
@@rcnhsuailsnyfiue2 You actually will according to neuroscience. That in-between state is a great place to subconsciously program information 🧠
Is a negative score possible because then I think I would find my score there.
Hello
Can you talk about French maths d ENS 1966 exam ? Or ENS exam in general
The undergraduate Tripos peaked in difficulty around 1970.
Why so?
@@tb8183 A levels started covering less material, and so people were not entering with such a high standard. The tripos therefore contained more basic material at the sacrifice of more difficult content. That's one reason.
Brilliant!
Recently I have seen your tough exam paper reviews and saw that you take some difficult questions and solve them . My question is , do you solve all those questions by yourself or you take some help from the internet . Because as a student i myself cannot remember all the formulas or theories . Even some theories that you mentioned in your early videos ( like pigeon -cage theory etc) are unknown to me. Moreover it takes al lot of time for me to understand tricky questions .How much time it takes for you to understand competitive tricky questions?
Basically I have started watching your channel recently and i have fallen in love to your channel for your earliest videos where you have explained your deep feeling and passion for science even though you were a not so good student . Believe it or not , after watching your videos I have decided , from now on I also shall study science from the core of my heart and enjoy the beauty of it like you . Though its true that sometimes not being able to solve hard questions hurts me as I hated it . Anyways , thank you Tibees . I dont know about others but you have been successfull to convey the massege of loving science to at least one person .May god bless you .
Ahh she is a little busy but she is concerned about you so she told me to pass it on to you that she solves them herself.
I kinda want to see how it is tackle and what is the answer though. Anywhere I can see it?
I'm curious how this compares with the kind of exams you would encounter at places like Stanford or MIT.
And Caltech
American graduate level exams are totally rubbish.
When I was doing Cambridge Part III maths (year 4 of the Cambridge maths Tripos), my friend Josh who was also doing the course said that he did his undergraduate maths at Oxford and then did a masters in maths at Harvard/MIT... He said that Masters degree level maths at Harvard/MIT was around the same level as first/second year maths at Cambridge.
@@electrocademyofficial893 Thanks...interesting.
@@leematthews6812 no probs
It looks like a much longer, and somewhat more academic, version of the Putnam Exam (which was probably modeled on it). Certainly there isn't a strong correlation between being a Putnam winner and being a first-rate mathematician - all the people I knew, even as undergrads, recognized it was a game which was irrelevant to your career in math. However, the Putnam is entirely optional and isn't given by your school, so you can do it or not without being judged (several of the best mathematicians I know never took it). At least this exam appeared to be aimed at a curriculum, which would encourage people to learn a subject instead of a bag 'techniques' (which is a weakness of the Putnam). It wasn't clear if the current Tripos is the same endurance test as the older ones, but if you're trying to sort people, which is one of the goals of a competitive exam, you have to do it somehow, and making it impossible to finish it the easiest way. The trouble with this approach is you measure speed, which isn't the most important quality in the real world.
Very informational. Could you perhaps cover some math exams or topics from Iceland? Perhaps you could dig up something interesting 🤓
Your voice is impressively relaxing me.
Long time fan of yours..... when you decide to move on from math (or maybe never, lol), you should do voice-over work - just love listening to you.