SIMO Retiree Blog

(David here.) Recently, a problem of mine came out as Q4 on SMO Open 2024. I'll go over how I proposed the problem and the theory behind it, which involves some machine learning ideas (!).

(Pengchong here). While in NS, I've been looking at some topics that I might've encountered back in school but not really gone too deeply into - one of which is real analysis, quite a common starting point for undergrad math. Though for those preparing for olympiads it probably doesn't have a high 'ROI', I think much of this stuff provides plenty of intuition for some olympiad problems I've encountered before.

 (Dylan here.) As usual, some non-maths, followed by some maths.

(This is Yan Sheng.) The time has come for me to finally write a post about actually solving an olympiad-level problem, in particular the thought process and the winding path that got me to the solution.

Hi, Choo Ray here. Before IMO 2024, the Singapore team had a joint friendly contest with Iran and Taiwan (spoilers ahead). As I found out, it takes quite a lot of work to run a contest. We wanted to simulate the IMO format in terms of topic diversity and difficulty but our shortlist lacked depth in certain topics.