About the Euler Project

Mathematics consists of proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way. (George Pólya, Hungarian mathematician)

This series will be about the tasks from the Euler Project, which is a a project page for mathematical riddles with increasing difficulty.

After signing up, you can upload your solutions in order to get credits. At the moment there are 725 riddles at 29 levels (25 riddles per level). As you can see, the first task has been solved by almost a Million people (the last one not even by 500…).

The Euler Community permits sharing the results for task 1–100.

All of the tasks can be solved on a normal PC within a few minutes if the algorithm is implemented correctly. Many of the tasks have a little twist, meaning that they could be implemented in a straightforward way, but also in a more interesting, “smart” way.

The roots of functional programming lie in the algorithmic computation of mathematical problems, so it’s not surprising that PicoLisp often enables us to write extremely concise and short code in order to solve these tasks. Similarly to the Rosetta code series, the main purpose of this series is to get more familiar with PicoLisp and its syntax and concepts.

When we find some interesting functions, we will pick them up for deeper discussion in the “PicoLisp Explored” Series.

Well, that’s the plan!

If you want to prepare, here is the task for the next post:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Sources

projecteuler.net
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/mathematical_symbol_fi..