I went to a mini-reunion with a few friends from my high school class up in Chicago last weekend (and got caught in the blizzard on the way back, but that's another story.)

I was reminded of the math that we did in high school, and what fun and challenge it was. Here's a problem from ninth grade:

Q: Given

x² + y² ≤ 1,

show that

|x² + 2 x y - y²| ≤ √ 2  .

Can your ninth grader solve this problem?

Responses[1]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on December 17, 2010 7:34:50 AM CST #

This month's OCI Java News Brief (JNB) is online now, in which Weiqi Gao challenges your Java knowledge with brain-teasers, Friday Java Quiz-style:

Weiqi Gao: For over ten years, the OCI Java News Brief series has been bringing noteworthy new developments in the Java space to its loyal readers. Simply by following this series alone, you would have learned eight scripting languages for the JVM, ten web frameworks, seven ways to mock your tests, and countless cool open source libraries to make your job easier.

However, with the progress of time, the Java platform has become more mature and has established itself as the development platform of choice for many application domains. Naturally, the jobs of some of the Java developers are much more mainstream than cutting-edge now.

With this change of pace of evolution, our focus naturally shifts from the shiny new libraries and tools to something more fundamental—the basic language constructs and the JDK class libraries—because these are the bread and butter of everyday life of the Java developer.

Weiqi went on posing five quizzes, involving six JDK classes:

• java.lang.Double
• java.lang.Thread
• java.lang.Runtime
• java.util.Properties
• java.lang.String
• java.sql.ResultSet

Go check it out!

Responses[1]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on December 1, 2010 10:03:00 PM CST #