The Carina Initiatives (https://carina.fund) is a friend of the math education
community which has supported organizations like Art of Problem Solving, BEAM, Athemath,
and others.
They’re starting a math talent search organization in the United States and are
looking to hire a full-time leader (salary $200K-$250K).
Passing this along in case anyone in this space might be interested in applying
or knows someone who might be. The link to apply is:
I’m happy to thank 日本評論社 and their team (Fuma Hirayama, Yuki Kumagae, Taiyo Kodama, Ayato Shukuta,
among others) for making the Japanese translation a reality.
As well as tripling the length of the errata PDF :)
This marks the second translation of the EGMO textbook (a Chinese translation
was published a while ago as well by Harbin Institute of Technology). Both linked below:
Japanese translation at nippyo.co.jp and amazon.co.jp.
ISBN-10: 4535789789 / ISBN-13: 978-4535789784.
Chinese translation at abebooks
and amazon.
ISBN-10: 7560395880 / ISBN-13: 978-7560395883.
The list of errata is now version controlled on GitHub:
vEnhance/egmo-book-errata.
So now you can actually see a changelog of the ocean of typos as they come in.
Shout-out to the crew working on the Japanese translation of the book for
finding way more errors than I will ever care to admit (I didn’t count,
but it’s probably in the 200-300 ballpark).
I took a snapshot my database entries for sourced problems in EGMO.
It turns out that I have many written up already,
so we now have something of a solutions manual for about half the problems or so.
Since I like idiotic names, I dubbed it the Automatically Generated EGMO Solutions Treasury.
By popular request, Twitch Solves ISL is renewed for a second season which will begin on Friday,
18 November 2022.
As in the past, streams will start at 8:00pm Eastern time on Friday nights,
and last 1-4 hours depending on how much coffee I drank that morning.
I’ve scheduled 26 episodes for the second season to follow anime standards;
this will last up through the spring semester of MIT, around May 2023.
That said, my holiday plans are to-be-determined so things are likely to change
around a bit around the end of December or early January.
The stream scheduled for 13 January 2023 is also likely to be modified due to
the 2023 Mystery Hunt,
which I’m nominally on the organizing team for (though I’m only helping a little bit this year).
After two years, 480 hours, and 102 episodes of Twitch Solves ISL,
I’ve finally decided that it’s time for me to take a hiatus from my weekly Friday night streams.
So, episode 102 will be the end of Season 1.
To answer the obvious question: I’m definitely open to having a Season 2,
although it will probably have to wait until after the summer (as I will be away from my stream setup then),
and it probably won’t last 100 episodes.
Between now and then, I might also sporadically stream video game sessions if I’m in the mood for it,
so if you come by Friday night, you might get to watch me play through something from my Steam library.
I’d like to thank all my viewers and 1800 followers on Twitch, for being such a great audience all …
A lot of people have been asking me how team selection is going to work for the USA this year.
This information was sent out to the contestants a while ago,
but I understand that there’s a lot of people outside of MOP 2020
who are interested in seeing the TST problems :)
so this is a quick overview of how things are going down this year.
This year there are six tests leading to the IMO 2021 team:
USA TSTST Day 1: November 12, 2020 (3 problems, 4.5 hours)
USA TSTST Day 2: December 10, 2020 (3 problems, 4.5 hours)
USA TSTST Day 3: January 21, 2021 (3 problems, 4.5 hours)
RMM Day 1: February 2021 (3 problems, 4.5 hours)
APMO: March 2021 (5 problems, 4 hours)
USAMO: April 2021 (2 days, each with 3 problems and 4.5 hours)
I’m happy to announce that sign-ups for my new olympiad style contest,
the United States Ersatz Math Olympiad (USEMO), are open now!
The webpage for the USEMO is https://web.evanchen.cc/usemo.html (where sign-ups are posted).
Logo for USEMO.
The US Ersatz Math Olympiad is a proof-based competition open to all US middle and high school students.
Like many competitions, its goals are to develop interest and ability in mathematics (rather than measure it).
However, it is one of few proof-based contests open to all US middle and high school students.
You can see more about the goals of this contest in the
mission statement.
The contest will run over Memorial day weekend:
Day 1 is Saturday May 23 2020, from 12:30pm ET – 5:00pm ET.
Day 2 is Sunday May 24 2020, from 12:30pm ET – 5:00pm ET.
There’s a new addition to my olympiad problems and solutions archive:
I created an index of many past IMO/USAMO/USA TST(ST) problems by what my opinions on their difficulties are.
You can grab the direct link to the file below:
In short, the scale runs from 0M to 50M in increments of 5M,
and every USAMO / IMO problem on my archive now has a rating too.
My hope is that this can be useful in a couple ways.
One is that I hope it’s a nice reference for students,
so that they can better make choices about what practice problems
would be most useful for them to work on.
The other is that the hardness scale contains a very long discussion
about how I judge the difficulty of problems.
While this is my own personal opinion,
obviously, I hope it …
People often complain to me about how olympiad geometry
is just about knowing a bunch of configurations or theorems.
But it recently occurred to me that when you actually get down to its core,
the amount of specific knowledge that you need to do well in olympiad geometry is very little.
In fact I’m going to come out and say:
I think all the theory of mainstream IMO geometry would not last even a one-semester college course.
So to stake my claim, and celebrate April Fool’s Day,
I decided to actually do it.
What would olympiad geometry look like if it was taught at a typical college?
To find out, I present to you the course notes for:
Careful readers of my blog might have heard about plans to
have a second edition of Napkin out by the end of February.
As it turns out I was overly ambitious, and
(seeing that I am spending the next week in
Romania)
I am not going to make my self-imposed goal.
Nonetheless, since I did finish a decent chunk of what I hoped to do,
I decided the perfect is the enemy of the good and that I should at least put up what I have so far.
So since this is someplace between version 1 and the (hopefully eventually) version 2,
it seems appropriate to call it version 1.5.
The biggest changes include a complete rewrite of the algebraic geometry chapters,
new parts on real analysis and measure theory,
and a reorganization of many of the earlier chapters
like group theory and topology, with more examples and problems …
