This was originally a diary entry, but I showed it to some students who told me I should put it in my blog instead. Imagine you’ve moved to a new town, and want to explore the local offerings, because there’s a lot to do and see, and you’re expecting to live here a while. The… Continue reading A story of a town
Category: Pedagogy
Yet another reason I don’t give much generic advice
So I have an FAQ now for contest-studying advice, but there’s a “frequently used answer” that I want to document now that doesn’t fit in the FAQ format because the question looks different to everyone that asks it. The questions generally have the same shape: “would it be better to do X or Y when… Continue reading Yet another reason I don’t give much generic advice
Agency
Sometimes my OTIS students suggest features or things for the OTIS website, and I reply “submit a pull request”. I’m usually half-joking when I say this, because I acknowledge that I’m essentially saying “please do the work for me”. But part of me isn’t joking. Because, one of the things I’ve grown to most value… Continue reading Agency
What I would add to the K-12 list
I often gripe about how standard K-12 education is overly focused on specific knowledge (how to solve a quadratic, memorizing dates for history, etc.) rather than general skills (e.g. "how to figure out how to solve a quadratic"). On the other hand, I understand why; teaching general skills is much more difficult than preparing a… Continue reading What I would add to the K-12 list
Pride
Sometimes people ask me how many of my students made the IMO, and if I’m in a bad mood I often give the super snarky reply, “I lost track”.1 That’s actually a white lie. The real answer is “I deliberately don’t keep track”. And in this post I want to explain why. It’s definitely human… Continue reading Pride
New handout: Intro to Proofs for the Morbidly Curious
Downloadable at https://web.evanchen.cc/handouts/NaturalProof/NaturalProof.pdf. I don't know why I thought to write this, but it's been bugging me for a year or two now that I've never seen the answer to "what is a proof" written out quite this way. So here you go. It's a bit weird for me to be writing an article that… Continue reading New handout: Intro to Proofs for the Morbidly Curious
Everything I need is on the ground
For me the biggest difference between undergraduate math and PhD life has been something I've never seen anyone else talk about: it's the feeling like I could no longer see the ground. To explain what this means, imagine that mathematics is this wide tower, where you start with certain axioms as a foundation, and then… Continue reading Everything I need is on the ground
A common type-error on the OTIS application
There's a common error I keep seeing on OTIS applications, so I'm going to document the error here in the hopes that I can pre-emptively dispel it. To illustrate it more clearly, here is a problem I made up for which the bogus solution also gets the wrong numerical answer: Problem: Suppose $latex {a^2+b^2+c^2=1}&fg=000000$ for… Continue reading A common type-error on the OTIS application
Sometimes the best advice is no advice
信言不美，美言不信。 I get a lot of questions that are so general that there is no useful answer I can give, e.g., "how do I get better at geometry?". What do you want from me? Go do more problems, sheesh. These days, in my instructions for contacting me, I tell people to be as specific as… Continue reading Sometimes the best advice is no advice
Book pitch
This is a pitch for a new text that I'm thinking of writing. I want to post it here to solicit opinions from the general community before investing a lot of time into the actual writing. Summary There are a lot of students who ask me a question isomorphic to: How do I learn to… Continue reading Book pitch
Power Overwhelming 