Sometime this week the American Math Competitions released the following new policy: For the IMO, EGMO, RMM, TSTSTs, and TSTs, and MOP, students must be US citizens or US permanent residents. Visas are not a valid substitute. (AMC Policies) I want to make a rather brief statement on why I was opposed to this change. To… Continue reading A short dissent on USA eligibility
Tag: politics
An opening speech for MOP
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… Continue reading An opening speech for MOP
117(d): Please don’t tax PhD tuition waivers
This is a rare politics post; I'll try to keep this short and emotion-free. If parts of this are wrong, please correct me. More verbose explanations here, here, here, here, longer discussion here. Suppose you are a math PhD student at MIT. Officially, this "costs" $50K a year in tuition. Fortunately this number is meaningless,… Continue reading 117(d): Please don’t tax PhD tuition waivers
Notes on Publishing My Textbook
Hmm, so hopefully this will be finished within the next 10 years. --- An email of mine at the beginning of this project My Euclidean geometry book was published last March or so. I thought I'd take the time to write about what the whole process of publishing this book was like, but I'll start… Continue reading Notes on Publishing My Textbook
Against the “Research vs. Olympiads” Mantra
There's a Mantra that you often hear in math contest discussions: "math olympiads are very different from math research". (For known instances, see O'Neil, Tao, and more. More neutral stances: Monks, Xu.) It's true. And I wish people would stop saying it. Every time I've heard the Mantra, it set off a little red siren… Continue reading Against the “Research vs. Olympiads” Mantra
___ Students Have to Suffer
This will be old news to most of the readership of this blog, but I realize I've never written it down, so time to fix that. Fill in the blank Let's begin by playing a game of "fill in the blank". Suppose that today, the director of secondary education at your high school says: "___… Continue reading ___ Students Have to Suffer
Power Overwhelming 