Terence Tao

I'd solve the one dimension problem first, or whatever.

There's a main term and an error term.

I'm going to make a spherical cow assumption.

I'll assume the error term is zero.

And so the way you should solve these problems is not in sort of this Iron Man mode where you make things maximally difficult.

But actually, the way you should approach any reasonable math problem is that if there are 10 things that are making your life difficult,

Find a version of the problem that turns off nine of the difficulties but only keeps one of them.

And solve that.

So you install nine cheats.

Okay, if you solve ten cheats, then the game is trivial.

But if you solve nine cheats, you solve one problem, that teaches you how to deal with that particular difficulty.

And then you turn that one off and you turn something else on, and then you solve that one.

And after you know how to solve the 10 problems, 10 difficulties separately, then you have to start merging them a few at a time.

As a kid, I watched a lot of these Hong Kong action movies.

It's from a culture.

And one thing is that every time there's a fight scene, you know, so maybe the hero gets swarmed by a hundred bad guy goons or whatever.

But it would always be choreographed so that he'd always be only fighting one person at a time, and then he would defeat that person and move on.

And because of that, he could defeat all of them.

But whereas if they had fought a bit more intelligently and just swarmed the guy at once, it would make for much worse cinema, but they would win.

Are you usually pen and paper?