An Elementary Math Problem Just Took Out Three Medical PhDs
A silver-medal math Olympian dad set the table. By lunch, his colleagues were still chewing on it.
A dad in Shaanxi, helping his daughter gear up for the primary-to-middle-school entrance exam, hit a problem he just couldn't shake loose. He'd once taken silver at the national Hope Cup math olympiad, so tutoring usually came easy — this time, the gears jammed.
He flicked the question into his colleagues' group chat. Three medical PhDs — from Xi'an Jiaotong Medical, Xiangya Medical, and Beijing 301 Hospital — hunched over scratch paper until lunch went cold. None of them walked away with a clean answer.
The internet's verdict: PhDs can crack a rare disease, but a primary-school word problem is a different specialty entirely. Someone suggested pinning these questions to hospital corridors, just to keep the playing field level.