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.
At least it’s not change.org.
I am of course flattered and grateful for the enthusiasm.
But there was a reason I didn’t post it.
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 …
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
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.
The old WordPress site can still be found for a few more weeks at
usamo.wordpress.com,
but eventually I’m going to turn that off so that
all the posts have a single source of truth here.
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.
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 …
During your turn, part of figuring out the best move involves looking into the
future to see what the next player will do. If they discard, will it be okay?
Is there some obvious clue that they will do? And so on.
As you get better at Hanabi, you will need to do this prediction not just for
the next player, but for an entire go-around of the table. And as you really
get good at Hanabi, you will need to do this for as far in the future as you
can reasonably predict. (Sometimes, this means 15 moves or more in the
future.)
Similar to chess, initiating a move in which you can predict the next sequence
of moves is called initiating a “line”.
In post-game reviews, we will often compare and hypothetically “play through”
two different lines …
I had a student at MOP ask me something equivalent to
“how should I study while at MOP?”There is also a question about whether you should be studying much at MOP
at all — you could also spend a lot of time making new friends, for example.
That’s a value judgment that I think is better left to individuals
and I won’t comment on it further in this post.
For those of you that don’t know, MOP
is the three-week summer camp for the USA’s team to the IMO.
At first I was going to just link my FAQ.
But then I thought about it a bit more, and I was surprised to find that
my answer was not the same as the general how-to-study FAQ.
The additional condition “while at MOP” was enough to cause me to
stay up that night writing an entirely different …
In my last semester of MIT I led a recitation (i.e. twice-a-week review) sessionFor those of you that don’t know how the system works, at MIT,
18.02 is a huge class with 400 to 500 students (mostly first-years).
In order to make sure students actually get the individual attention they
need (impossible during lecture), the math department also places each student in a
recitation section
of about 20 students each, meeting twice a week for an hour each.
for multivariable calculus (18.02) at MIT
(although the first few weeks are all linear algebra).
It’s different from many contexts I’ve taught in before;
the emphasis of the class is on doing standard procedures,
but the challenge is that there is a lot of ground covered.
That is, compared to other settings I’ve taught,
there is generally a tradeoff of less depth for more …
I was a coordinator for last year’s IMO 2024 and this year’s IMO 2025.Before, I was a coordinator for some virtual IMO during the pandemic too,
which is much less fun. And from 2017-2019 I was an observer for the USA.
Here’s some thoughts about that, contrasting my IMO 2019 post.
What is coordination?
For those of you that don’t know, coordination is the grading process for IMO.
As I describe it in my FAQ:
Basically, the outline of the idea is: before the exam, a marking scheme
(rubric) is set for each problem, to cover the typical cases of what progress
will be worth what points. Then, the leaders of each country get to see the
solutions of their country’s students, while there is a number of coordinators
from the IMO host country for each problem. Both the coordinators and the
leaders read …
Cubics and theater
