honors class the supply of problems in mathematics is inexhaustibleand as soon as one problem is solved numerous others come forth in its place -"mathematical problems, hilbert this contains problems that are more difficult to solve than the ones presented earlier many of them are commonly asked at interviewsalbeit with the expectation that the candidate will not deliver the best solution there are several reasons why we included these problemsalthough mastering these problems is not essential to your successif you do solve themyou will have put yourself into very strong positionsimilar to training for race with ankle weights if you are asked one of these questions or variant thereofand you successfully derive the best solutionyou will have strongly impressed your interviewer the implications of this go beyond being made an offer--your salarypositionand status will all go up some of the problems are appropriate for candidates interviewing for specialized positionse optimizing large scale distributed systemsmachine learning for computational financeetc they are also commonly asked of candidates with advanced degrees finallyif you love good challengethese problems will provide ityou should be happy if your interviewer asks you hard question--it implies high expectationsand is an opportunity to shinecomparedfor exampleto being asked to write program that tests if string is palindromic intractability coding problems asked in interviews almost always have one (or moresolutions that are faste (ntime complexity sometimesyou may be asked problem that is computationally intractable-there may not exist an efficient algorithm for it (such problems are common in the real world there are number of approaches to solving intractable problemsbrute-force solutionsincluding dynamic programmingwhich have exponential time complexitymay be acceptableif the instances encountered are smallor if the specific parameter that the complexity is exponential in is smallsearch algorithmssuch as backtrackingbranch-and-boundand hill-climbingwhich prune much of the complexity of brute-force search