New profiles!

Hey everyone, One of the feature requests that we've seen frequently is that when you come across an amazing user-submitted solution or discussion post, you want to see other solutions or posts by that same user. We've made this and much more possible in our recent update to everyone's profile pages. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Cheers, The team at Brilliant

Easy Math Editor

This discussion board is a place to discuss our Daily Challenges and the math and science related to those challenges. Explanations are more than just a solution — they should explain the steps and thinking strategies that you used to obtain the solution. Comments should further the discussion of math and science.

When posting on Brilliant:

Use the emojis to react to an explanation, whether you're congratulating a job well done , or just really confused .
Ask specific questions about the challenge or the steps in somebody's explanation. Well-posed questions can add a lot to the discussion, but posting "I don't understand!" doesn't help anyone.
Try to contribute something new to the discussion, whether it is an extension, generalization or other idea related to the challenge.
Stay on topic — we're all here to learn more about math and science, not to hear about your favorite get-rich-quick scheme or current world events.

Markdown	Appears as
`italics` or `_italics_`	italics
`bold` or `__bold__`	bold
- bulleted - list	bulleted list
1. numbered 2. list	numbered list
Note: you must add a full line of space before and after lists for them to show up correctly
paragraph 1 paragraph 2	paragraph 1 paragraph 2
`[example link](https://brilliant.org)`	example link
`> This is a quote`	This is a quote
# I indented these lines # 4 spaces, and now they show # up as a code block. print "hello world"	# I indented these lines # 4 spaces, and now they show # up as a code block. print "hello world"

Math	Appears as
Remember to wrap math in `$` ... `$` or `\[` ... `\]` to ensure proper formatting.
`2 \times 3`	$2 \times 3$
`2^{34}`	$2^{34}$
`a_{i-1}`	$a_{i-1}$
`\frac{2}{3}`	$\frac{2}{3}$
`\sqrt{2}`	$\sqrt{2}$
`\sum_{i=1}^3`	$\sum_{i=1}^3$
`\sin \theta`	$\sin \theta$
`\boxed{123}`	$\boxed{123}$

Comments

Furthermore,

Note that you can now attempt to solve any problem solved by a person who's profile you click on, regardless of what level it is in. So if you have ever been curious what people in other levels are solving you can now find out by clicking on their profiles.

Peter Taylor Staff - 7 years, 9 months ago

Thank you so much for this update!!! I love being able to solve so many more problems :)

Michael Tang - 7 years, 9 months ago

Do you think you can develop some sort of search bar. So you can search for people you know? That would be awesome!

Alex Benfield - 7 years, 9 months ago

Great work! I love the new profiles.

Now that you are tweaking, can you do a little addition to "Past Solutions" section? I have been a member of this site from March 2013. Each week I left some of the problems unsolved. Recently, I have thought of returning back to those problems and try them again but it takes a lot of time to reach the previous problem sets. I mean I have to scroll down a lot and click "Load Previous Week" a numerous times to reach the first problem set I attempted. If possible, can you make this job a little easier for us, for example by adding a drop-down menu which lists all the problem sets?

EDIT: Moreover, I wanted to report that the scroll bar which appears in the Past Solutions section, does not function at all in Google Chrome. I often need to switch to Mozilla Firefox for that.

Thanks!

Pranav Arora - 7 years, 9 months ago

Yes, the scroll bar doesn't work for me too. I opened a discussion thread about that but got no response.

Mursalin Habib - 7 years, 9 months ago

Just what I've been waiting for, thank you so much! I also like the details about every little thing, such as number of problems submitted. The only thing I'm still waiting for is the section which shows how many solutions have been featured. This came on Brilliant and was removed for some reason.

Also, instead of featured solutions, voting goes on forever, which I think is less of a good idea than the featured solution idea.

Ahaan Rungta - 7 years, 9 months ago

This is awesome. It's also great how we can even submit solutions for problems not in our problem set. Here are some minor suggestions:

Just like the solution vote count is shown in green, it would be cool if that would be done too for the topic vote count and comment vote count.
Maybe you can divide all activitiy of a user in tabs, e.g.: "Solves", "Solutions", "Comments", "Topics", and "Votes" for a better overview.
When visiting a problem from somebody else's problem set, it would be rather handy to have a badge or something similar indicate from which level it is.

Tim Vermeulen - 7 years, 9 months ago

I think your first point is a good idea, and we will probably do it soonish.

With your second point, are you asking for a way to easily filter your feed, or another person's feed? For example If I went to your profile and only wanted to see your discussions comments, I could click a button and it would only display your discussions comments chronologically.

The last point is a little more complicated because there is so much overlap between levels, but we can definitely find someway to communicate what the difficulty of the problem is in the scheme of Brilliant.

Peter Taylor Staff - 7 years, 9 months ago

I was talking about just any feed, actually, so I could see a list of just the problems someone has solved recently, or the comment's he's made, etc.

Oh yes, I forgot about the overlap. Maybe the number of point that could be earned could be displayed, although that might be confusing, because you can't actually earn points on a problem not for your problem set. Maybe you could show the problem sets it appears in.

Tim Vermeulen - 7 years, 9 months ago

excellent update!!!

Utkarsh Mehra - 7 years, 9 months ago

One thing, though, I don't know if I like the lifetime points disappearing under quick hover-profiles. I used that a lot. Unless Brilliant is trying to get us away from profiling and stereotyping by lifetime points, which makes sense since "lifetime" is relative.