You know that image that goes around the internet where there’s a picture of a triangle, and one of the sides is labeled x, and the problem asks, “Find x,” and someone has drawn an arrow to the x and written “Here it is”?

Well, I see things like that sometimes.

bug report

I have trimmed out the student’s pleas for more points.

Based on the problem ID number, I have a decent hunch of who wrote this problem (I left the team writing problems for this project when the ID numbers were in the 26000s.). Likely I will edit the problem to include the words “the value of.” Such is the world of mathematics. Some students will read the problems incredibly literally. Other students have such a freeform view of notation that they are upset when the parser doesn’t recognize the submission of “10 squirt” or “10 sort” (postfix function notation, lack of parentheses, a heavy dose of autocorrect) as \(\sqrt{10}\).

Aside: Across all projects, I expect that we are rapidly closing in on having a hundred thousand problems in our collection. (I am excluding the problems that only appear in our books from this count.)

Aside 2: As always, we are hiring. In addition to the usual suspects, yesterday we for-real put up a job whose title is “Cat Herder.” If you know someone who is a generally competent human being with significantly above-average common sense and who wants to live in San Diego and work with a bunch of mathematicians, now would be a great time to get in touch. You can find the job ad on LinkedIn.

Aside 3: While we rarely have actual cats at work, we always have dogs.