(Bloomberg Opinion) -- I recently found myself lost in college nostalgia: late nights in the lab, last-minute cram sessions, and the time someone turned the dorm floor into an ice skating rink. Wait, what!?That last memory was actually a scene in “Real Genius,” a Val Kilmer movie that turned 35 this week. It only made about $13 million at the box office, but math and science geeks like me have embraced it as cult classic. Set at the fictional “Pacific Tech,” the film follows two young Einsteins -- Chris Knight and Mitch Taylor -- on their quest to cut class and build a five-megawatt laser.(1)
In the real world, the U.S. military hasn’t quite made it that far yet, although they’ve tested some truly terrifying laser cannons. “Real Genius,” on the other hand, was never meant to be taken literally -- but that’s OK, a little imagination and out-of-the-box thinking may be just what you need to solve a Conundrum in the movie’s honor:
While testing out their new laser, Chris and Mitch accidentally shot the beam straight through their notes on course registration for the fall. All that’s left are a couple charred pages, with part of each word burned off. And worse: To stop their classmates from spying on them, they’d written everything down in a way that obscured their plans. As a result, the text is doubly difficult to reconstruct.
There’s still one class they have to take before they can graduate. Can you help them remember what it is?
If you manage to put together the answer in a stroke of genius -- or if you even make partial progress -- please let me know at skpuzzles@bloomberg.net before midnight New York time on Wednesday, August 19. (If you get stuck, there’ll be a hint announced in Bloomberg Opinion Today on Tuesday, August 18. Sign up here.) To be counted in the solver list, please include your full name with your answer.
Last Week’s Conundrum
The first of two mysterious maps offered 50 dots, one in each U.S. state. Some of those dots were capital cities (Montgomery, Alabama, and Juneau, Alaska, for example), but others seemed harder to place. Nevertheless, I hinted that this “shouldn’t be the biggest challenge.” And indeed, these weren’t the biggest cities in every state, but rather the second-biggest (measured by population).
The second map was even more puzzling. There were dots all over the world, but with significant concentration in Eastern and Central Europe. I mentioned that soon this map would gain another dot in Russia, suggesting that the marked locations were associated with some sort of event. But what event happened in Sofia, Bulgaria, Mar del Plata, Argentina, and also Canberra, Australia? Why, the International Mathematical Olympiad, of course! The map plotted all the cities that have hosted the event since its inception in 1959.(2)