Ryan's Repository of Random Reflections

My proudest accomplishment as an undergraduate student is the 400+ Project Euler problems I solved. In this blog post, I will do some data analysis on my progress over time, and talk about how I got to where I am today. In December 2014, I wrote a blog post about reaching my first Project Euler milestone: 200 problems solved. A lot has changed since then, and many of the techniques I used to reach 200 weren't very useful in getting to 400, as the problems became more challenging. The above plots show my progress over time. The first one simply shows the number of problems solved on a given date, and the second one breaks down my solved problems by difficulty (a recently added feature on Project Euler that tells you how challenging a problem is). I was over halfway done with undergrad when I reached 200 problems solved, so I never really thought I would get to 400 by the time I graduated, especially since the problems became significantly harder and my courses became more ...

Today I solved my 200th Project Euler problem! Project Euler is a great website that posts weekly programming challenges. It is a great way to learn a new programming language, master the art of algorithm design, and learn about fascinating math concepts. In light of this milestone, I decided to do some data analysis on my Project Euler progress since I started solving these problems about 2 years ago. The first problem on Project Euler states: If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. I am not going to post any solution to this problem, but instead encourage you to go check out the website and see if you can figure it out! If you think that problem is too easy, don't worry they get harder. I first found out about Project Euler in my second semester as a Freshman. I joined the website and solved my first problem on February 17th, 2013....