There are two brothers who are well-known in academic ophthalmology in the U.S. Those of you in the field will know who I am referring to, but I will not mention names. Both of them are incredibly intelligent clinician-scientists. One of them is actually a genius. No, not your everyday “super smart” guy, but a real genius. He apparently is the youngest medical school graduate in the World Record books, and has wunderkind abilities akin to that of Mozart. No joke.

In any case, I had the fortune of meeting both of them during the residency interview season. They are known to be difficult interviewers; some have mentioned that they pose challenging dexterity tasks to their interviewees. One applicant was asked to pour water into a narrow-spout without spillage. Another was asked to throw some knots using 12-0 sutures (without loupes). One of them interviewed me for a spot at his program.

Going into my interview, I wasn’t too nervous about these menial skills. I had poured gallons of anti-freeze into the tiny tanks of cars in my lifetime working the blue collar jobs. Those long hours of video gaming sessions certainly honed my dexterity. What else could he ask me to do? Well, my interview took an interesting turn.

He did not greet me as I entered his office. He did not ask me to sit down, nor did he even look at me directly during my entire interview. His desk had stacks of papers scattered about, along with remnants of silk sutures, styrofoam cups filled with blue water, and 0.3oz bottles. I remember that he asked me whether the U.S. should invade Iran, and that I muttered that I didn’t think there would be any economic or political benefit to the U.S. if that were to happen. He subseqently made several arguments that suggested that I knew little about politics at all (which is probably true).

He followed up by asking me if I really was well-versed in college basketball. Yes! On my application, I had listed that I loved watching college basketball. Indeed, as a Blue Devil fan, I went to my share of basketball games. At the time, I knew who the best free throw shooters in the league were, and which teams had a decent shot at winning. I watched a lot of basketball. Try me! I told to fire away. And then he dropped the bomb on me:

“So, in a single-elimination basketball tournament with 128 teams, how many games will be played?”

Math eh? I didn’t see that coming. It sounded like one of those M$ or Cisco interviews rather than a medical residency one. Well, I gave it some thought:

In a tournament, there can only be one winner. Everyone else is a loser. Every match will produce one loser. So in a group of N teams, there must be (N – 1) losers. There will likely be (N – 1) matches. At the time, I was nervous. I wasn’t confident that my logic was correct. So I quickly ran through some arithmetic in my head: With 2 teams, there will be 1 match, with 3 teams…2. (Team 1 and 2 play, and then the winner plays Team 3, for a total of 2 matches). That logic seemed to work out.

I told him “127″. He asked me why, and I explained my logic. His only response was, “Not good enough.” He then stood up and motioned me out of the office.

Wtf?

I was miffed. During the rest of the interview day, I was thinking about the problem. I scribbled more computations on the lunch napkins, and I was convinced that I was right.

Now that it has been more than a year or so since that encounter, I am still not sure what he meant by his response. Did he want a formal proof? Based on induction alone, I could have shown with brute force the number of games needed for a small number of teams and induced the result for N teams. Or did he want something with a binary tree? Doing so would probably involve some base 2 logarithms which would eventually simplify to (N – 1). To this day, I am still baffled by the genius. “Not good enough?”  I guess I simply wasn’t good enough.

If any of you have any thoughts, please contact me. I’d like to learn something. This sort of stuff keeps me up at night.

medicine ophthalmology