SIMO Retiree Blog

(Drew here.) I've spent a lot of time browsing random math pages on Wikipedia  (blue link). Sometimes I find things which are actually useful in olympiads, but a lot of the time there's this void of open problems. Of these open problems, some were only solved recently, and they can be used to blast olympiad problems.

(This is Glen.) I was sorting through my stuff and found a piece of paper from when I tried last year's NTST problems, which I presumably saved because I thought I might eventually want to write a post about it. So here I am, writing a post so I can safely dump this piece of paper into my recycling bin.

(Drew here.) Let's take a dive into a problem from the 2023 IMO Shortlist. This is C5, one of the hardest shortlist problems this year (but let's be honest, the whole C list was devilishly hard).

(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.

(Yu Peng here) Sometimes, you feel like you should be on the right track in solving a problem, but your solution falls short a little, due to issues like having a suboptimal bound, or having a condition you need but isn't true. At other times, you could just be struggling to find the optimal construction. At such times, it would often do you good to take a step back, and think about how you can optimise your solution.

(It's Glen again!) This post is going to be long, and as the title suggests, contain very many circles. Relatedly, most of the diagrams in here are hand-drawn and scanned because no way am I going to figure out how draw all of these diagrams on computer. You have been warned.

(Xu Chen here) Hi everyone! Today I will be talking about 2018 C5, and my thought process while solving it.

(Wee Kean here.)

Hi everyone! Sheldon here. I've been working for a while, so I haven't had many opportunities to do Olympiad math recently (or at college, for that matter). However, a few days ago, some of my friends and I had the privilege to attend an event where we met some students who had gone to this year's IMO.