I was in a club last Saturday and I met this really interesting person.  I had more than 30 minutes of quite interesting intellectual conversation with a Jewish guy who apparantly owns a big outsourcing company here in the Philippines.  He had been a software engineer in the US and he had his MBA from the US also. He said his forte is Corporate Strategy. He’s around 40 (my guess)  and he dances funny. We got a chance to talk amidst the loud blaring musing and after some drinks. 

He asked me about my line of work. He asked very specific questions that required very detailed answers. I tried to be general about my answers by saying that I work in LISP with AI projects. And we are independent contractors and our parent company manages mutual funds through an AI software. But no.. he wanted details.

Me: (Hestitating) Well, it is a long explanation and it may get complicated.
Guy: Try me.
Me: Okay. We have our own proprietary environment, language and software.. blah, blah..blah.
Guy: AI is a general term?  What branch of AI do you deal with?
Me: Natural Language Processing.
Guy: What aspect of NLP do you deal with?
Me: Well.. (Hesistating)
Guy: C’mon. You won’t lose me. I will understand you. I get things quickly.
Me: Hmm.. Okay. Primarily our interest is text summarization….blah blah blah.
Guy: (Shifting topic) So you only deal with stocks what about other equities? And your return is quite low. I had a friend that does algorithmic development and he get this much blah blah … in a year.
Me: Well, we have different products depending on the risk you want to take….blah blah blah
Guy: So you went to to law school for a bit then you did this work. What was your undergrad?
Me: Mathematics.
Guy: (Surprised) So what is square root of two over two?
Me: (stumped) I don’t know. (I’m such a moron! )
Guy: (Laughing) (And she said she’s BS Math?!?)
Me: Seriously. I know square root of two is two raised to the power one half and you divide it by two raised to the power one.
Guy: No, no. It’s fine , really.

*Waaaaahhhhhh*

I was kinda pissed. I had those really good answers before he asked the square root question. I could not for the life of me get the square root of two over two. I felt my four years of Math education was for naught. I asked my friend who is a computer science graduate the question what is square root of two over two. He said 1.

Then I realized that it may have different interpretations:

Well, I chose Interpretation B, because of the following reasons: We say Interpretation A as square root of quantity 2 over 2 to emphasize that the fraction 2/2 is inside the square root sign. In the absence of the “quantity” term, Interpretation B applies. Also I never encountered a math exam or exercise that asked me to get the the square root of 2/2.

I asked my Math teacher who is also my colleague. He said .707, which is 1 over square root of two, which is two raised to the power one half divided by two raised to the power one, which is two raised to the power negative one half. I asked another math graduate and after confusing it with math identities, he said that it’s .707.

My colleague who is a Computer Science as his friends who are CS graduates. Their answers are one.

I guess for a question like: What is the square root of two over two, the answer depends on your background. Of course, that doesn’t justify my “I don’t know” answer which until know makes me angry at myself. I should have known better. Still, I felt that the conversation was like a job interview inside a club! My friend who was with me in the club told me that he worked for that guy’s company before and he’s brilliant. His company is one of the biggest outsourcing companies in the Philippines. Obviously! I explained my work, our business model and he got it in one explanation inside a club. He rephrased my statements and asked the right questions. I felt like I was in a job interview!

How would you interpret square root of two over two?

Kinda weird conversation inside a club, eh?

Still.. saying I don’t know, made me feel like a moron.