How to avoid being hit by a laser in a room of mirrors [video]
The solution is great, but it shows a fundamental flaw in mathematics, that I am thinking about a lot: You have to be smart, no doubt, but you also have to know the answer to get to the solution - It requires so many steps first until &quot;the solution &#x2F; the proof is clear&quot;. If you go down a different route (as I would have done), then you&#x27;d likely not succeed and certainly be in &quot;rough&quot; unknow territory, making it difficult for others to help or assess your approach. And this is expected: The hard problems will take the smartest people to solve eventually. I wish we could be more honest about that, that Math is a lot about &quot;memorizing problems&quot;. And that was always the case (over history): At some point in history all this was a frontier. And there will be people willing to fight on this frontier and I am not disputing that intelligence&#x2F;logical thinking is also required. I am just wondering if all this couldn&#x27;t be put to more practical use. But then maybe it is and as fascinating as it is, most of us move on from Math and work on real world engineering tasks, eventually and from time to time still look back to these problems, as we do today. And absorb them, adding them to our repertoire and looking&#x2F;assessing for real world application, which likely is limited &#x2F; none.