I can't talk about the Java part, but CW is literally full of mathmematical katas (not to mention you could ultimately analyze almost any kata in mathematical terms), so I see no reason to worry here :)

You could consider the mathematical approach as a way to skip a brute-forcish approach and do things the smarter way :)

Math is an essential part of software engineering, and if you think you can be a good engineer without math side, than I can assure you that you are hardly mistaken. Unless you want to be designer or "web-front-design-fancy-interface" type of programmer, which is not really software engineering.

I had the names in an array that put a copy of the 1st name in the end. rotate once and repeated as many times as possible. worked for low numbers but for large numbers timed out. From that point I figured it had something to do with math and lost interest.

While question is indeed quite mathematical, I managed to finally solve it "almost" empirically through trial-and-error using programming as a tool for my experiments. It was fun. The task looks simple but bites hard.

This is a very bad kata.

• The initial code does not compile and does not follow Java standards.

• The question is purly mathematical and not a coding question.

Clever solution, but this will cause a lot of string concatination garbage.

The kata should describe the expected result in more detail. That null should be returned in case of an empty string is not documented. In addition the test case results in case of an error are unclear in that case.