Over the last 10 years, I have read every single problem set submission to OTIS. I think this is almost 20,000 submissions to date.For the OTIS students looking at the ID numbers on problem set submissions: those go up to about 18k now, but there were also submissions before OTIS-WEB had a dedicated PSet model.

So here’s something that I think will surprise you: the submissions don’t look anything remotely alike. The variation in work quality is staggering. Since I’m not going to show any samples for privacy reasons, I’m not going to mince words about this either:

• On one extreme, some submissions are breathtakingly well-polished. They are neatly typeset with full-color diagrams and read well. They’re better than what you would see in most published textbooks.
• On the other extreme, some submissions are incomprehensible. They remind me of xkcd 1513, 1695, 1833 …

Please welcome CJ Quines as the first OTIS staff

I’m happy to announce that CJ Quines will officially be joining OTIS as staff for the 2026–2027 school year. After twelve years of OTIS, I’m finally starting to grow the team from the one-person show that it’s been up until now.

I think this is the part where I’m supposed to introduce the new staff. CJ is also a math+CS major from MIT (and also ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈), and was an avid blogger for MIT Admissions. The first paragraph of CJ’s biography on MIT’s site goes:

What does it take to get to know someone? I’ve written three hundred thousand words in these blog posts, and I don’t think that’s enough. I’ll save you the effort to learn the basics, at least: my name is CJ, I graduated in 2023 …

It’s Teacher’s Day in India today, which means I get extra license to yap today. So this is a bundle of several unrelated pieces of news from my life (to avoid making a post for each one). Don’t worry, there are more actual posts in the works this year.In fact, yesterday some of you might have seen me accidentally publish an unfinished post on LinkedIn and Facebook through my old unused Wordpress. Which I didn’t know was possible.

My guest essay on math competitions

Earlier this year I wrote a guest post for an external Substack, called What’s Happening to the World of Math Olympiads?. This is an essay about what math competitions are for intended for people who might not know much about them (i.e., not my usual audience). At a high level, the main things I tried to explain to the …

This post is advice for problem-solving beginners in math. It’s halfway between Getting to know problems and Imperative statements in geometry don’t matter, but now I got it down to three words that are easy to remember: don’t be GPT-3.

What does that mean?

Basically, I see a failure case in a lot of beginners who get fixated on some (often superficial) detail or wording in the problem statement, and then try to pattern-match it to something they read somewhere before. In doing so, they stop actually thinking, and that’s a disaster recipe.

The reason I call this “don’t be GPT-3” is in reference to this toy problem:

Prove that if $\theta$ is a real number for which $\cos \theta$ is an integer, then $\sin \theta$ is an integer.

For a good high school math …

The 2026 American Masters in Math took place from May 22 to 25, 2026.

On the whole it went better than I expected. Because from the insider view, working with OMEGA reminded me a bit of… okay, let me make up an analogy. You know how AlphaGo often wins its games by just a few points, but always wins?

This AMM reminded me of that. Things often happened at the last possible moment, yet still technically in time.Scores when? So things seemed haphazard on the inside, and I was quite stressed most of May. But somehow in the end it all worked.

It’s also hard for me to overstate how much of AMM 2026 rested on Yia’s shoulders. Up until April or so, it felt that Yia was singlehandedly doing everything except the exam problems. (She did eventually get help: I thank Hong Liu, Kathy Lin, Walter …

Cubics

Last summer I taught a lecture at MOP about curves of degree higher than 2. I finally posted the handout from that lecture on my website, because a lot of students have been asking me repeatedly, and one of my students went so far as to start a petition.

I am of course flattered and grateful for the enthusiasm. But there was a reason I didn’t post it.

Theater

That reason comes down to the following quote from my 2023 post:

You’ll notice that I’ve started using words like “delivery” or “performance”, and that’s deliberate. To do lectures well, you need to rehearse things like not saying “um”, choosing really flashy or shiny topics, managing blackboard space, keeping an audience engaged, and cutting out content to streamline the presentation (whereas in writing, you can e.g. put digressions …

For high school math olympiad students, OTIS XII applications are out, due August 1, 2026.

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 $$f(a,b) = (ab-1)^2 + (a-3)^2 + (b-3)^2 …$$

TL;DR: New Pelican blog! You can email-subscribe via https://list.evanchen.cc.

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.

See the subscribe page if you want to subscribe.

1. New features for readers

Really the primary motivation for the migration is easier maintenance for me. But readers might notice a few nice things:

• A new skin that’s more minimalist.
• Sidenotes.
• Server-side LaTeX rendering instead of the hacky WordPress images.
• Cleaner URL scheme: this post will be blog.evanchen.cc/pelican instead of the old URL scheme with the dates. (The old URL’s will still be redirected …

Life isn’t a straight line. Finding your dream career involves a lot of twists and turns, like a river. In my search for the perfect job, I find myself constantly changing course, because even though planning is helpful, the plans themselves are useless.

In past years, I’ve been through sailing, college consulting, and fashion design. And now I find myself eating my words from last year. Despite how much I hate New York, I’m thrilled to announce the upcoming opening of T.O.A. Asian FusionPlease forgive the slight RAS syndrome in the name. at 33 Sunrise Hwy, Merrick, NY 11566.

Here’s the press release from Newsday on the Merrick location:

T.O.A. Asian Fusion is on a roll. Four months after opening its fifth location, in East Islip, the restaurant group has announced its sixth: Evan …

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 …