SIMO Retiree Blog

(This is Yan Sheng.) In my mind, J. Kenji López-Alt is the greatest nerdsniper chef: he has made claims about cooking methods and techniques, based on experimental evidence, which have become the inspiration for later theoretical research.

(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.

(David here!) I wanted to talk about a problem I encountered in 2020 during Putnam seminar, and the subsequent exploration I did on it. It's still unresolved but I hope my thought processes could help those who are interested in understanding how to propose problems.