PROFESSOR: You know, to be honest,
for the most part, I did what I had to do,
went through the standard process--
generally, I was-- it didn't take me long to do that--
until I finally ran into an eighth grade teacher who
basically realized that I was pretty
bored by the standard problems in the class
and was able to get through it without much trouble,
and he gave me the opportunity to do some work on my own,
and gave me problems to work on my own
that were not in the textbook and were very unlike anything
I've ever seen.
And then he convinced me to--
at that time, there weren't all these contests
that I mentioned, but there was one in Colorado.
And he convinced me to try and take it.
And, you know, I thought I was pretty smart,
as a lot of young teenagers do, and took the test.
And most of the tests, I found easy,
but there were a few problems on there
that stunned me because they seemed like totally
simple trivial problems.
But I had no idea how to solve them.
I didn't even know how to start even
thinking about the problem, and that actually both, you know,
sort of annoyed me, but it also intrigued me
that there were problems out there that clearly people
expected you to be able to figure out.
But I no idea how to do it.
And I can actually even remember the problem that stumped me.
I ended up spending a good chunk of the test
just trying to figure this problem out and of course
did very, very poorly as a result.
But I couldn't let go of it.
It was you have a child's toy that's made up of cubes,
and each of these cubes is painted
with six different colors.
Each side is a different color-- same six colors
are used for all the cubes.
And the question was simply, how many-- and all the cubes
are different, so no-- you pick up two cubes.
You can't rotate one to make it the same as another one.
And the question was how many cubes are there?
And I thought about it, and I thought about it,
and I thought about it.
And I couldn't come up with a good answer
in the course of the test, but that's
one of the questions we answer in the course.
And now I can give you a very simple answer.