Hello lichess users,
Hope this finds you well. Recently, I've been trying to improve my maths olympiad skills (doing JBMO and IMC Key Stage III papers), and learning new theorems. However, it is quite painful and I don't see a lot of improvement. Can you guys share some of your experiences with maths and maybe provide me with some advice?
Thank you so much
Sleeping 8-10 Hours the night before
What genre of problems are you struggling with? Are there any examples of problems you didn't solve in this area which we can use to give more specific advice? The generic advice is just to do lots of problems and not worry about learning loads of theory, but I assume you have already heard this. Another thing I would suggest if you aren't already doing it is looking at solutions after an hour (approx, it varies ofc) spent on a problem with no further progress. Don't worry if you aren't improving that fast, improvement is slow and often not noticeable for awhile. Also I assume you already know about https://artofproblemsolving.com, questions are probably better asked there than on a chess site.
I keep trying to picture what math team uniforms would look like.
Math Olympiad problems are specifically designed to not only require an excellent understanding of the field of the problem, but also a certain amount of creativity. JBMO as far as I know is tailored for junior high school students and younger, so I'm assuming they won't include questions that require you to know some obscure theorem from the field of Algebraic Topology or Differential Geometry or other high-level maths.
Of course, that's not to say that you won't need quite a lot of extra curricular knowledge that isn't taught at schools. But your question was how you could improve you Math Olympiad skills. Well, in my opinion, that would be to continue what you're doing but also find a local Math club or something of the like. Usually Math Olympiad teams have a coach who guides them through the learning process and gives them material to study.
For the maths and Physics olympiads as a number of people have said, there is a lot of creativity involved. For example there are plenty of mathematics PhDs who were not particularly good at the olympiads even though they are excellent mathematicians. There are also those who were gold medalists in the international olympiad that never made it as mathematicians.
Basically the best way to describe it is that MO problems are elementary but from a very advanced standpoint. So for example, you wont ever need to solve something like a Neuman problem in the maths olympiad but you could end up seeing an exceptionally difficult problem in elementary geometry where the only way to really see the solution is to come up with the idea to draw a number of additional lines on the diagram in question which helps to give you a foothold into the problem.
Also, as the olympiad essentially takes place in four different major tests, the levels will get incrementally harder (it also depends on the country involved).
Initially you will be doing something which is much more akin to standard high school maths tests if quite a bit harder. Those that obtain the top scores will be invited to do the main national olympiad tests which will then end up with typically around 20 or 25 people (sometimes a lot more for the more populous countries) who obtain the gold medals and they are then invited to a camp to select the main team for the internationals. That is the third test. And finally there is the international test where different countries play against eachother.
The questions in the international olympiad vary very slightly based on what country is hosting but are generally extremely challenging and require extreme understanding of the subject to do well. That simply comes from spending a lot of time in the given areas and sometimes even the very best will only be good in one particular area say geometry or number theory. In general you are far far better off focusing on something you are very strong at rather than trying to be an all rounder - the only all rounders I have encountered in such competitions were so exceptional that they never needed to ask how to get better - they simply could do everything with very strong intuition without really being taught.
Having said all this, there are SOMETIMES questions where if you know a lot of advanced maths you could solve the problem in a way the examiners were not expecting to - however that is really not very useful as you won't know if this is necessarily the case beforehand and if you knew enough maths to get a first at maths in university you wouldn't be bothering with the olympiads.
You can find books with previous questions from the olympiads - I found that very helpful when I was doing them, and your teacher should also be able to give you one on one coaching hopefully which would also be useful.
Good luck - the olympiads are fun but they are indeed very difficult.
I've deleted the comment and I felt bad.
The person on my city that took the first place on Math Olympics was trained by me, for fun :)
It's a child, she is lovely.
1. Distance yourself from others: I don't know if this applies to your country, but here, the average math skills are horrible. One day she came to my house and she said: I took 10 out of 10 in my lesson. Then she said, I did this, I did that, I was the best in my class. I told her: Math is horrible in our country, you need to distance yourself from others even more, your math is still not good enough.
She proceeded to train even more, and play even more with me, math games, math skills and chess, she learn when she was 6, and I taught her the entire game :)
I'm quite unhappy, I don't think she will win. I've distanced myself from her, and she's not studying, even if she took first place without studying before, something that I've also taught her, cause you can't study the day before, you need to practice every day, this will eventually kill her chances.
She needs to practice, and she only practiced with me, anyone else :(
Math Can Improve You but you can't improve your Math!
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