Project Euler Forum

I'm not a mathematician. I'm doing problem 1005. I have a naive solution that will definitely not scale. I just want to confirm that the "one-minute rule" on the About page indeed applies to ALL problems on the site, including the latest ones?

My follow-up question is: If so, where can I go to get hints on where to get started, what to read etc. for a particular problem.

In general my difficulty with project Euler is trying to understand which problems can be solved by thinking on it for a while and which ones require mathematical results that are only likely to be known by people who have studied more advanced mathematics.

Thank you!

Some of the early problems teach the fundamental ideas. Do not skip these, even if they seem easy. Specially read the solution tread.

1005 is solvable with nothing fancy. I solved it about 2 hours. (“The most skilled solvers completed this problem in a time of around 12 minutes.” ← clearly not me)

If your computer is a really ancient laptop, the 1-minute rule may be a 5-minute rule for newer problems. I know this from running code from the solutions treads.

I think the developers aim is the make problems solvable by anyone with an interest in math and no more than high-school math. You will need to pick up some number theory, modular arithmetic, graph theory and probability. The early problem are helpful here.

Good luck

kghose wrote: Sat Jul 25, 2026 4:02 am In general my difficulty with project Euler is trying to understand which problems can be solved by thinking on it for a while and which ones require mathematical results that are only likely to be known by people who have studied more advanced mathematics.

It's worth bearing in mind that PE sits at an overlap between mathematics and theoretical computer science. Some questions have a stronger focus on mathematics, and in extreme cases can be solved without even writing any code: others have a stronger focus on TCS and some mathematics PhDs have to learn things which I was taught as a CS undergraduate in order to solve them.

A good general purpose hint is to try to figure out how much work you would have to do, to within an order of magnitude, for a brute force solution. So for problem 1005, to find the median by brute force you would have to compute the entire list. Are there approximately $10^6$ partitions into primes? $10^9$? $10^{12}$?