The Book I Wrote While an Undergrad Student at IIT Madras

The first book I wrote was during my undergrad at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

I wrote it during my last year there, and it was called "The Olde Curiosity Shoppe".

Not the one above. That was written by a chap called Charles Dickens.

Any way, the title of the book was a reference to the fact that trivia questions are often about curious little facts. This is as contrasted with mathematical puzzles, which have to do with knowing, as it is increasingly turning out, specific branches of mathematics.

When I moved to the Bellevue-Redmond area, a suburban area of Seattle, WA, to work for Microsoft, I came to know that there was actually a shop by that name in Seattle.

Believe it or not, in one of my coding interviews with a large tech company in Silicon Valley, I was asked to find an optimized way to find the fastest way to find the n-th number in the Fibonacci series. And thi was supposed to be a programming interview. This requires knowledge of a branch of mathematics whose name we are probably better of not knowing. 😊