Brilliant is a community for high aptitude students around the world. Brilliant aims to democratize the way smart, driven youth are identified and developed by offering an intellectually challenging environment online.

On Brilliant, members can tackle challenging concepts and problems with others in the community, and submit written solutions. Members can also participate in discussions on different topics in math and science, and submit their own notes, musings, and problems and to share with the community.

After you create an account, you will be asked to follow some topics you are interested in. This will determine what topics of conversation and problem solving will appear on your homepage. You then take a diagnostic quiz in the topics you chose to follow to determine your initial rating and level in each. Your rating and level determine the difficulty of the material on your homepage.

Every day, you will see new problems and conversations that are being actively worked on by the community in the topics you follow. Following people on Brilliant will expose you to additional conversations and problems written by members to enjoy and learn from.

We are a team of educators, olympiad all-stars, academics, technologists, engineers, admissions experts, and college administrators. Our investors have advised leaders in education services such as The Princeton Review, SparkNotes, Mind Snacks, and The Learning Company. We have led community initiatives to improve college access and promote civic engagement, particularly for low-income communities.

Interested in working with us? Apply for a job at Brilliant.

Brilliant is not a school, a test prep service, or an official competition. We do not teach a comprehensive curriculum, although solving problems on our site can help you learn math, science, and engineering at a deeper level. Brilliant structures its problem sets to be fun, challenging, and interesting.

In the future, some features on the site may cost money. In addition, schools and companies may be able to pay to recruit our users through our site. We will certainly alert all of our users well in advance before we implement either of these changes. Right now, we are focused on making the best site possible for bright, motivated people everywhere to push their intellect.

Please direct all general questions about Brilliant, as well as questions about the points exchange or your user account to support@brilliant.org.

Please direct all questions pertaining to notes to discussions@brilliant.org.

After you create an account on Brilliant.org, a brief diagnostic exam will assign you your first level (1-5) in any of the subjects we offer. Each week, you will have access to problem sets designed to be more challenging and interesting than problems you would get in school and tailored to your ability. You have three chances to get the correct answer to each question in a problem set.

People and problems on Brilliant have ratings with respect to our official topics. Your personal ratings are measurements of your skill in each topic. The problem ratings measure the difficulty of problems relative to your skill. Ratings on brilliant exist to help you track your improvement, and help us show you problems that are just right for you.

There are five difficulty levels of problem solving for each official topic on Brilliant. In each level, we offer a range of problems that are interesting and challenging without being either too simple or too difficult.

Each level is subdivided into ratings: 0-1249 (Level 1), 1250-1499 (Level 2), 1500-1749 (Level 3), 1750-1999 (Level 4), 2000+ (Level 5). A higher rating reflects a higher level of experience and problem solving proficiency in a topic. As your rating increases, we will level you up and show you harder problems.

Your topic ratings are visible to only you. Your topic levels are visible to anyone who visits your profile.

Answering problems correctly will cause your rating to increase. The amount your rating increases or decreases is proportional to the difference between your own rating in a topic and the problem’s rating. For example, if you have a 1,200 rating in Algebra and you correctly answer a problem that is rated 1,500, your rating will go up more than if you correctly answer a problem that is rated 900.

When you first view a problem, your rating drops a little. This is because when you only view a problem without trying to answer it, we cannot tell whether you did not answer because it was too hard or because you did not even try. You can increase your rating by answering the problem correctly.

You have three chances to get the correct answer to each numerical answer problem you attempt on Brilliant.

Your home page is filled with problems and notes written or reshared by the people and topic accounts (for example, Best of Algebra) that you follow.

“Best of” accounts in each topic share problems written by the staff of Brilliant.org, and reshare the finest notes and problems written by our community of members. The “Best of” accounts only share and reshare to you problems at your level in each category.

All the problems that you click on can be easily found again in your started section. After you finish problems, they get a green check mark in your started list. Problems and notes that you are fond of can also be favorited and then easily referenced in your favorites section.

The minimum age requirement is 13 years of age. Most members of the Brilliant community are in high school or college, but adults of many ages also enjoy the intellectual stimulation of our problem sets.

All problems on Brilliant strive to be interesting and better than your common homework problem, regardless of level. The level one problems tend to cover the most fundamental aspects. Level five problems are very difficult, and require deep understanding of the subject.

It takes good people to create problems. So far our small team has focused on developing problems for math and physics. As the site grows, and as the community contributes back more problems, we will branch into other disciplines.

The problems are designed to be solvable with pencil, paper, and human reasoning. In physics problems, using a calculator is encouraged to arrive at a correct decimal answer. For mathematics problems, solutions that use computer programs are considered valid if you can justify why there was no error in your computation. In general, if you find yourself wanting to brute force an answer with a computer, there is probably a more elegant way to go about it that you are not seeing.

Heavens no! The desire to work on challenging problems is worth being proud of, regardless of level. Given the range of ages and educational opportunities amongst our members, it is only natural to see a wide range of ability on Brilliant.org. Study and practice with problems on Brilliant can improve your abilities and your level.

Achieving a high level on Brilliant problem sets demonstrates a tremendously high aptitude and skill in the subjects offered. Practically speaking, being in a high level also allows you to receive more points per correct problem. In the scheme of things, solving challenging problems with known solutions is pretty cool, but not nearly as cool as curing diseases, solving the world's energy problems, feeding the hungry, or advancing the field of pure mathematics.

We encourage you to share problems from Brilliant with your friends, and have built a "Share this problem" feature for this purpose. Please do not request answers to problems from Brilliant on other sites. This could effectively make the answer public and spoil the challenge for the problem solving community on Brilliant. If you see a Brilliant problem posted on an external site please email support@brilliant.org to report it.

We can't think of a legitimate reason why you would need more than one account. We will assume that people with multiple accounts are using them to cheat at Brilliant, and will take appropriate actions.

Any email you receive from Brilliant contains an unsubscribe link. You can opt out of any and all news updates from Brilliant at any point in time.

Please go into the Personal Information tab of your Account Settings page, accessible by clicking your name at the top of the page, and attach a scan of a valid i.d. When you have uploaded valid proof of your age, please email support@brilliant.org and we will process your age change request.

Absolutely nothing. Inactivity on Brilliant does not cost you points or factor into your performance at all.

If you would like to delete your account, please email support@brilliant.org.

Notes are a way for you to interact with other people all over the world, who, like you, enjoy challenging their minds for fun. You should feel free to talk about almost anything. You could share news stories, articles, facts, images, and things on the web that you find interesting and think others might too. You could also use notes to ask the community for advice. Or you could pose problems in math, science, or engineering that you have come across that you think are interesting. You really can post about anything.

You can find the rules and guidelines for notes here.

When you subscribe to a note, you receive automated email updates whenever somebody comments on that note.

When you post a note, you are automatically subscribed to that note.

Anytime you comment on a note, you are also automatically subscribed to replies to your comment. Additionally, there is a link near the top of each note that can subscribe you to a note even if you have not commented on it.

You can unsubscribe from a note by clicking the unsubscribe button on the original post.

At Brilliant, we want to celebrate your creative abilities. Publishing a note is a great opportunity for you to challenge the Brilliant community, and for you to both start and engage in discussions with a wide group of your Brilliant peers.