James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:

In no sense did I intend a real math question. But I suspect that the meta-game of asking ?Are there ten things I can do that nobody else can do all of? How about nine? How about eight?? (or a variant) has a name in pop (nerd) culture, and I was hoping to elicit it from one of you.

That would be a very difficult question to answer. Not the question of whether your first question has a name (though if it does, I don't know it), but your first question itself. (Speaking of questions, the digest option on this list turns so-called "smart" quotation marks and all other non-ASCII characters into question marks. So I wish people would stick to ASCII. Thanks.) A few weeks ago, I was in a discussion with friends, and they started speculating on which historical person had the highest-ever IQ. For instance did Archimedes have a higher IQ than Newton? I think that just might depend on what language the test was in. More generally, I think that's a profoundly misguided way of looking at the world, not much more meaningful than asking who would do best at playing your favorite video game. I made the perhaps over-bold claim that since there are more possible tasks than there are people, everyone can be the best in the world at *something* if they work at it diligently. I'll moderate it to say that almost anyone without any major disability can be in the top ten in something if they're willing to put in the effort. I also mentioned United Flight 232, which lost all its hydraulics, making it unflyable. The pilot managed to land it anyway. It wasn't a particularly good landing, but the majority of passengers did survive. In all other cases of a passenger jet losing all its hydraulics, everyone died. And there have been countless computer simulations of that situation, all of which ended in a crash. The Flight 232 passengers should be thankful that their pilot was someone very good at piloting rather than someone very good at taking IQ tests. How many things are there that it would be possible to be the best at the world in? You could start with the Olympic records and with the Guinness Book. Or with one of those lists of astonishing human achievements, such as Lynne Cox, who swam from Alaska to Russia through miles of freezing-cold water, wearing just an ordinary bathing suit. Or just look at some relatively narrow field such as ham radio, in which there are records for lowest-power trans-Atlantic contact (less than one microwatt), most countries communicated with in one day/week/month/year, shortest time to communicate with all countries, highest data rate, lowest data rate (I think the current record is one bit per day), lowest frequency, highest frequency, most contacts in one day, lowest power for bouncing a signal off the moon, etc. Then multiply the total by the number of hobbies, professions, sports, games, etc., that exist. Also, of course, for everything that's ever been done, someone holds the record for having done it first. Like most people here, there are a few math problems I was the first or only person to solve, and a few others for which I think I have the best algorithm for searching for solutions. This is of course doesn't mean I'm the person best able to solve such problems, but that they didn't happen to catch the attention of anyone better suited to solve them who had the free time available. I may hold the record for the geekiest ever Wikipedia update. I was casually browsing some of its math-related articles when I happened to notice that the twin primes constant was wrong in the 7th decimal place, so I fixed it. There are records that most of us would like to set, such as being the world's oldest person ever, beating Jeanne Calment, who lived to be 122. There are records that none of us would like to set, such as being the American wrongfully imprisoned for the longest. Richard Dan Phillips of Michigan holds the record for being exonerated and freed after 45 years (1972-2017), but the wrongfully-imprisoned record is almost certainly held by someone who was never exonerated.