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

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 …

When I finally open my eyes and look at the clock, it is 8am. It doesn’t feel like it’s only been eight hours, though. I’ve just had a long and complicated dream that I can’t remember much of anymore, except that I think I was running a lot, and trying to not die, so I somehow feel sore.

That NyQuil stuff really works, I think to myself, and crawl out of bed. (Even though it’s like trying to drink mouthwash.) I haven’t slept that soundly all week. Or maybe I’m finally slowly recovering from my cold, and that’s why that night was better? All I know is that I’m glad I didn’t spend another night coughing my lungs out and struggling to get some shut-eye.

I drag my sorry butt out of bed and head over to my nearby computer …

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 …

With Christmas Day, here are some announcements about my work that will possibly interest readers of this blog.

OTIS V Applications

Applications for OTIS V are open now, so if you are an olympiad contestant interested in working with me during the 2019-2020 school year, here is your chance. I’m hoping to find 20-40 students for the next school year. Note that the application has math problems in it, unlike previous years, so you have to start early.

OTIS Lecture Series

At the same time, I realize that I will never be able to take everyone for OTIS. So I am planning to post a substantial fraction of OTIS materials for public consumption, hopefully by late January, but no promises.

Napkin 2nd edition

The Napkin is getting a second edition which, if all goes well, should come out by the end of February (but that is a big “if …

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 …

In the previous post we defined $p$-adic numbers. This post will state (mostly without proof) some more surprising results about continuous functions $f \colon \mathbb Z_p \rightarrow \mathbb Q_p$. Then we give the famous proof of the Skolem-Mahler-Lech theorem using $p$-adic analysis.

1. Digression on $\mathbb C_p$

Before I go on, I want to mention that $\mathbb Q_p$ is not algebraically closed. So, we can take its algebraic closure $\overline{\mathbb Q_p}$ — but this field is now no longer complete (in the topological sense). However, we can then take the completion of this space to obtain $\mathbb C_p$. In general, completing an algebraically closed field remains algebraically closed, and so there is a larger space $\mathbb …$

I think this post is more than two years late in coming, but anywhow…

This post introduces the $p$-adic integers $\mathbb Z_p$, and the $p$-adic numbers $\mathbb Q_p$. The one-sentence description is that these are “integers/rationals carrying full mod $p^e$ information” (and only that information).

The first four sections will cover the founding definitions culminating in a short solution to a USA TST problem.

In this whole post, $p$ is always a prime. Much of this is based off of Chapter 3A from Straight from the Book.

1. Motivation

Before really telling you what $\mathbb Z_p$ and $\mathbb Q_p$ are, let me tell you what you might expect them to do.

In elementary/olympiad number theory, we’re already well-familiar …

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.