But I’m really going to use that short announcement as an excuse to
describe the second most common error I see on the OTIS application
(the most common error is this type-error I wrote about in 2023).
The mistake is so obvious I feel stupid writing about it,
but I keep seeing it.
So I’m going to record it anywayFree blog advertisement every time I see this mistake again, right?,
even though most of the readers of the blog will laugh at me.
Here’s a problem I made up to demonstrate it:
Problem: For real numbers a and b,
determine the minimum possible value of
If you’re reading this, that means I’ve successfully
moved my blog from WordPress to Pelican!
If you want to see how this website was made,
you can see the entire source repository.
There might be some things off with the migrated old posts;
open a pull request
if you spot any and I’ll be grateful.
The old WordPress site can still be found for a few more weeks at
usamo.wordpress.com,
but eventually I’m going to turn that off so that
all the posts have a single source of truth here.
Some of you have probably noticed that I’m helping with
organizing a new contest
and are asking what exactly this is.
So far, I haven’t said much about it because so much is up-in-the-air
(and that’s still true).
However, with the first few acceptances and registrations coming out,
I’m going to post an FAQ and few quick thoughts of my own.
Just to be clear, everything here is my own personal commentary and views
and not those of my employer or OMEGA generally.
What is OMEGA?
OMEGA (Organization for Math Engagement and Growth in America)
is a new 501(c)(3) whose ambitious long-term goal
is to build great, robust math programs for thousands of students
all across the USA (whether competition-like or not).
However, that is a pipe dream, because OMEGA is also about four months old
and has a whopping four staff, many of …
The 2025 Teammate Hunt
runs from March 28 to April 6. Please check it out!
(Yes, I’m on the organizing team.)
USEMO 2025 is open to all middle and high school students now
(the US requirement has finally been dropped).
Problem proposals are open now and are due on May 10, 2025;
see the USEMO page for submission instructions.
After being in development hell for 10 years,
the silly weekend project I put together in 2015 is finally up:
Olympiad GeoGuessr,
a dumb game where you can try to guess collinear and concyclic points
from real MO diagrams.
Thanks to Abdullahil Kafi for contributing a lot of the recent levels.
Two pieces of news for high school math contest enthusiasts:
OTIS Mock AIME 2025
We’re running the OTIS Mock AIME again this year! It’ll go from December 19, 2024 to January 20, 2025.
New this year is that we’re offering two tests, I and II, and you can try either or both.
However, unlike the real AIME, the two versions are intentionally different:
The OTIS Mock AIME I is going to be tough.
It will definitely be harder than the actual AIME, by perhaps 2 to 4 problems.
But more tangibly, it will also have significant artistic license.
Problems will freely assume IMO-style background throughout the test,
and intentionally stretch the boundary of what constitutes an “AIME problem”.
The OTIS Mock AIME II is meant to be more practically useful.
It will adhere more closely to the difficulty and style of the real AIME.
There will inevitably …
Twitch Solves ISL will resume on September 13, 2024 and September 20,
2024 at the usual time. Then a two-week break (because I’m traveling on both September 27 and October 4),
and then continuing on Fridays for some to-be-determined number of weeks. Check the calendar.
In addition, this Sunday (September 8) at 7PM EDT [EDIT: meant Sunday!
agh], by popular request from the otters,
I’ll be streaming a session where I work on part of the calculation that I need for my PhD thesis.
It’s not going to make any sense so I dunno why people want to see it, but give the kiddos what they want.
If it goes well I might run more of them.
USEMO dates
USEMO 2024 will take place 26 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 and is open to US students,
see the …
The application and syllabus are pretty much going to be the same as in previous years;
here are some of the (mostly small) changes:
I deleted the question that used to ask about past contest results because I
never read the answers to it anyway.
The application problem set is one geometry problem shorter.
Problem C.1 had its description change from “Learn to code” to “Learn to code, please,
I implore you” to encourage more people to not skip the problem.
Reading Comprehension answers are now all nonnegative integers who sum is six
times a prime to make it harder for people to get the answers wrong when they submit a late application.
(For on-time application, the Google Form …
Here’s a mix of several publicity-related things I’d like to broadcast.
AlphaGeometry
A lot of you have already heard the buzz about the
AlphaGeometry news
and Nature paper.
(I’ve known about this paper for a while now,
so I’m glad I can finally talk about it!)
I managed to snag a cameo in the DeepMind post where I wrote
AlphaGeometry’s output is impressive because it’s both verifiable and clean.
Past AI solutions to proof-based competition problems have sometimes been
hit-or-miss (outputs are only correct sometimes and need human checks).
AlphaGeometry doesn’t have this weakness: its solutions have
machine-verifiable structure. Yet despite this, its output is still
human-readable. One could have imagined a computer program that solved
geometry problems by brute-force coordinate systems: think pages and pages of
tedious algebra calculation. AlphaGeometry is not that. It uses classical
geometry rules with angles and similar …
An example of a symmetric function with an asymmetric minimum