Project Euler

Last week I was shown a website, http://projecteuler.net, that offers a long list of math problems and challenges the reader to develop an efficient algorithm, which should be able to find the solution in a minute or less. So far, I've gone through the first ten problems and found that they could all be solved with a basic knowledge of algebra and number theory, particularly prime factorization.  A few didn't even require writing an algorithm and were readily solved with a calculator and some scratch paper!  However, a quick glance at the last problems (there are nearly 400 problems total) shows that there are some very challenging problems ahead.  In fact, the first problem has been solved by over 200,000 users while the last problem has been solved by just over 100.

This seems like good way to get practice in various areas of math as well as algorithm design.  So, I plan on working through these as time allows and will post descriptions of my solutions to any problems I find especially interesting.