While making preparations for this year’s MOP, I imagined to myself what I would say on orientation night if I was director of the camp, and came up with the following speech. I thought it might be nice to share on this blog. Of course, it represents my own views, not the actual views of MOP or MAA. And since I am not actually director of MOP, the speech was never given.

People sometimes ask me, why do we have international students at MOP? Doesn’t that mean we’re training teams from other countries? So I want to make this clear now: the purpose of MOP is not to train and select future IMO teams.

I know it might seem that way, because we invite by score and grade. But I really think the purpose of MOP is to give each one of you the experience of working …

In yet another contest-based post, I want to distinguish between two types of thinking: things that could help you solve a problem, and things that could help you understand the problem better. Then I’ll talk a little about how you can use the latter. (I’ve talked about this in my own classes for a while by now, but only recently realized I’ve never gotten the whole thing in writing. So here goes.)

1. More silly terminology

As usual, to make these things easier to talk about, I’m going to introduce some words to describe these two. Taking a page from martial arts, I’m going to run with hard and soft techniques.

A hard technique is something you try in the hopes it will prove something — ideally, solve the problem, but at least give you some intermediate lemma. Perhaps a better definition is “things that will …

tl;dr I parodied my own book, download the new version here.

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:

Undergrad Math 011: a firsT yeaR coursE in geometrY

It’s 36 pages long …

Pictures, thoughts, and other festives from the 2019 Romania Masters in Math. See also the MAA press release.

Summary

Po-Shen Loh and I spent the last week in Bucharest with the United States team for the 11th RMM. The USA usually sends four students who have not attended a previous IMO or RMM before.

This year’s four students did breathtakingly well:

1. Benjamin Qi — gold (rank 2nd)
2. Luke Robitaille — silver (rank 10th)
3. Carl Schildkraut — gold (rank 8th)
4. Daniel Zhu — gold (rank 4th)

(Yes, there are only nine gold medals this year!)

The team score is obtained by summing the three highest scores of the four team members. The USA won the team component by a lofty margin, making it the first time we’ve won back to back. I’m very proud of the team.

Pictures

I think it would be nice if every few years I updated my generic answer to “how do I get better at math contests?”. So here is the 2019 version. Unlike previous instances, I’m going to be a little less olympiad-focused than I usually am, since these days I get a lot of people asking for help on the AMC and AIME too.

(Historical notes: you can see the version from right after I graduated and the version from when I was still in high school. I admit both of them make me cringe slightly when I read them today. I still think everything written there is right, but the style and focus seems off to me now.)

0. Stop looking for the “right” training (or: be yourself)

These days many of the questions I get are clearly most focused on trying to find a perfect plan — questions like …

There’s a recent working paper by economists Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule which I think would be of much interest to this readership: a systematic study of IMO performance versus success as a mathematician later on.

Here is a link to the working paper.

Despite the click-baity title and dreamy introduction about the Millennium Prizes, the rest of the paper is fascinating, and the figures section is a gold mine. Here are two that stood out to me:

There’s also one really nice idea they had, which was to investigate the effect of getting one point less than a gold medal, versus getting exactly a gold medal. This is a pretty clever way to account for the effect of the prestige of the IMO, since “IMO gold” sounds so much better on a CV than “IMO silver” even …

I’ve added a new Euclidean geometry handout, Constructing Diagrams, to my webpage.

Some of the stuff covered in this handout:

• Advice for constructing the triangle centers (hint: circumcenter goes first)
• An example of how to rearrange the conditions of a problem and draw a diagram out-of-order
• Some mechanical suggestions such as dealing with phantom points
• Some examples of computer-generated figures

Enjoy.

Some thoughts about some modern trends in mathematical olympiads that may be concerning.

I. The story of the barycentric coordinates

I worry about my geometry book. To explain why, let me tell you a story.

When I was in high school about six years ago, barycentric coordinates were nearly unknown as an olympiad technique. I only heard about it from whispers in the wind from friends who had heard of the technique and thought it might be usable. But at the time, there were nowhere where everything was written down explicitly. I had a handful of formulas online, a few helpful friends I can reach out to, and a couple example posts littered across some forums.

Seduced by the possibility of arcane power, I didn’t let this stop me. Over the spring of 2012, spring break settled in, and I spent that entire week developing the entire theory of …

1. Synopsis

One of the major headaches of using complex numbers in olympiad geometry problems is dealing with square roots. In particular, it is nontrivial to express the incenter of a triangle inscribed in the unit circle in terms of its vertices.

The following lemma is the standard way to set up the arc midpoints of a triangle. It appears for example as part (a) of Lemma 6.23.

Theorem 1 (Arc midpoint setup for a triangle)

Let $ABC$ be a triangle with circumcircle $\Gamma$ and let $M_A$, $M_B$, $M_C$ denote the arc midpoints of $\widehat{BC}$ opposite $A$, $\widehat{CA}$ opposite $B$, $\widehat{AB}$ opposite $C$.

Suppose we view $\Gamma …$

In a previous post I tried to make the point that math olympiads should not be judged by their relevance to research mathematics. In doing so I failed to actually explain why I think math olympiads are a valuable experience for high schoolers, so I want to make amends here.

1. Summary

In high school I used to think that math contests were primarily meant to encourage contestants to study some math that is (much) more interesting than what’s typically shown in high school. While I still think this is one goal, and maybe it still is the primary goal in some people’s minds, I no longer believe this is the primary benefit.

My current belief is that there are two major benefits from math competitions:

1. To build a social network for gifted high school students with similar interests.
2. To provide a challenging experience that lets gifted students …