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Comment by NabiNaga | Hacker News Reader

I've solved 273 as of now (https://projecteuler.net/profile/NabiNaga.png). It took me a little less than 2 years to get to 250 problems, but I was spending quite a bit of time on them haha. I've learned an incredible amount of math and algorithm skills from PE. There have been lots of really challenging ones, but one that stands out is 494. That was the first "really hard" one I solved, and my first time to be in the first 50 solvers.

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That is quite an achievement. Can you comment on your background ? type of education, work.

I was finishing up the second year of a computer engineering degree when I discovered Project Euler, and after a few months of solving the problems I realized I wanted to study math instead, so I switched my major to applied math. Honestly I learned more from solving PE problems than school. Now I'm working in industry on AI.

That's encouraging to hear. I'm 30 problems in so far since starting ~1.5 months ago. I starting working through the PE problems to develop my python and general programming skills since I have been primarily using R as a data scientist. I'm glad someone else has found it useful for this field.

My routine was to solve the problem, then spend time reading through the solutions in the forum to see how I could optimize my code. Many times this meant completely rewriting my solution. For a lot of problems I spent more time making my code run as fast as possible than I did solving the problem in the first place. Doing this was critical for learning algorithms and techniques that I needed to solve future problems.

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