(Bloomberg Opinion) -- I recently found myself lost in college nostalgia: late nights in the lab, last-minute cram sessions, and the time someone turned the dorm floor into an ice skating rink. Wait, what!?That last memory was actually a scene in “Real Genius,” a Val Kilmer movie that turned 35 this week. It only made about $13 million at the box office, but math and science geeks like me have embraced it as cult classic. Set at the fictional “Pacific Tech,” the film follows two young Einsteins -- Chris Knight and Mitch Taylor -- on their quest to cut class and build a five-megawatt laser.(1)

In the real world, the U.S. military hasn’t quite made it that far yet, although they’ve tested some truly terrifying laser cannons. “Real Genius,” on the other hand, was never meant to be taken literally -- but that’s OK, a little imagination and out-of-the-box thinking may be just what you need to solve a Conundrum in the movie’s honor:

While testing out their new laser, Chris and Mitch accidentally shot the beam straight through their notes on course registration for the fall. All that’s left are a couple charred pages, with part of each word burned off. And worse: To stop their classmates from spying on them, they’d written everything down in a way that obscured their plans. As a result, the text is doubly difficult to reconstruct.

There’s still one class they have to take before they can graduate. Can you help them remember what it is?

If you manage to put together the answer in a stroke of genius -- or if you even make partial progress -- please let me know at skpuzzles@bloomberg.net before midnight New York time on Wednesday, August 19. (If you get stuck, there’ll be a hint announced in Bloomberg Opinion Today on Tuesday, August 18. Sign up here.) To be counted in the solver list, please include your full name with your answer.

Last Week’s Conundrum

The first of two mysterious maps offered 50 dots, one in each U.S. state. Some of those dots were capital cities (Montgomery, Alabama, and Juneau, Alaska, for example), but others seemed harder to place. Nevertheless, I hinted that this “shouldn’t be the biggest challenge.” And indeed, these weren’t the biggest cities in every state, but rather the second-biggest (measured by population).

The second map was even more puzzling. There were dots all over the world, but with significant concentration in Eastern and Central Europe. I mentioned that soon this map would gain another dot in Russia, suggesting that the marked locations were associated with some sort of event. But what event happened in Sofia, Bulgaria, Mar del Plata, Argentina, and also Canberra, Australia? Why, the International Mathematical Olympiad, of course! The map plotted all the cities that have hosted the event since its inception in 1959.(2)

Franklyn Wang solved first, followed by Anna Collins, Lazar Ilic, Ravi Jagadeesan, Eric Wepsic, Karl Mahlburg, and Vladimir Novakovski.(3)Ceren Alici and two anonymous solvers correctly identified the first map but not the second.

Eric Wepsic pointed out that many of the first map’s cities are also the sites of the largest public university campuses in their respective states. And FiveThirtyEight’s Riddler, Zach Wissner-Gross, evidently solved the first map, at least – he submitted a “second-place” hand signal emoji.

The Bonus Round

Fifteen popular logic puzzles; a breakthrough in understanding number patterns; Malaysia's most complex cakes (hat tip: Ellen Kominers). Virtual Pokémon trivia; drawing with linkages; turning Taylor Swift into economics textbooks; turning ordinary people into balloons. Liberating $300,000 of bitcoin, legally. And inquiring minds want to know: How might the universe end?

(1) Along the way, Chris mentors Mitch through some of life’s geekiest questions, such as: What would you do if gravity reversed itself? Is fighting back in a prank war a “moral imperative?”

(2) Hence my other clue that “You might use all your quantitative skill to figure out what this map represents, and then discover it actually isn’t about the numbers at all.” Math Olympiads sound like they should be about numbers, but actually their questions typically center around proofs of abstract mathematical statements and concepts.

(3) And thanks again to Spaceman Spiff for helping craft the Conundrum!

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

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