Ep 17: Andrew Fisher, Adib Surani (July 31, 2012; originally aired August 24, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Disclaimer: While I have not seen this episode before, I did play through the blue book (episodes 1 to 50) around ten months ago when I was scheduled to be a contestant on the show.  Additionally, I did a quick flick through it a few months back to collect words for my posts about word validity.


Not too surprisingly, Andrew enjoys solving hard cryptic crosswords.  More unusually, though, he also enjoys composing them and has even managed to get a few published in The Times.  Impressive!

Tonight's challenger is Adib Surani, a pure mathematics student who has been winning mathematics competitions since the age of seven.  His friends know him as "a calculator substitute", and he has an ambition to one day solve the Riemann hypothesis.  That's quite an ambition, for sure.  Adib explains that the Riemann hypothesis is one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics right now.

(That's true, although the conjecture that people care about is more the generalised Riemann hypothesis; a lot of consequences of deep interest would follow from a proof of GRH, and my impression is that the importance of a proof of RH is more to do with how such techniques might then be applied to GRH (as well as being further supporting evidence for it) than for results that flow from a proof of RH itself.)


Andrew got off to a good start with the only eight-letter word and just never let up, finding great results throughout in both letters and numbers.  Adib was not able to match him, and although he got some late points back in the last numbers game it was too little too late, and Andrew cruised through to a 64 to 29 victory.

I was all over the place today, missing a numbers game that I feel I should have solved and being too slow to find a couple of words that I would have found when in top form.  Some confusion on the conundrum kept me slow there, and I lost by over twenty points to Andrew.  On the plus side, I did manage to find a word that eluded both him and David, and that is always something to be happy about.