Writing Math Contests

Up until now, I haven't been writing much on the subject of Mathematics in general, which is basically my primary interest apart from doing arbitrary things with technology. I recently have been solving and finding new techniques for the Waterloo Math Contest questions, as I was supposed to write the contest this year (unfortunately it got cancelled). When I was going through some of them, I found some particularly interesting questions, ones that are far different from basic questions which you might come into contact with during your regular Math classes. So I was thinking about giving my explanations/solutions for some of them in some later blog posts. Like that, I can further practice explaining questions which will then in result, help me better understand what is it that I am solving.

You can have a look at some of these questions for yourself, on the Past Contests section, which can be found on their website. I also recently found out that they have a Problem Set Generator on their website as well. You can essentially choose whether you would like to solve a set of questions from a specific contest, or you can solve them by categories too. If you want to solve a set of problems based on various different topics of your liking and based off of a level of difficulty, you can use their Topic Generator to choose 30 random questions accordingly. Likewise, if you would like to solve problems based on a collection of randomly chosen questions from previous contests, use their Contest Generator. I might use this in the future, but for now I'm just going to go through each of their past contest questions and practice solving them in order to prepare for next year.

For those who haven't wrote this contest before, it is usually split into three parts; (1) Part A, (2) Part B and (3) Part C. Questions from parts (1) and (2) tend to be easier, so I will not cover many questions from those sections, as they really aren't that complicated. Questions from part (3) are usually the better ones, as they can sometimes take a bit longer to solve and there are usually numerous ways of solving the same problem. I find the ones that involve number theory and combinatorics to be the most interesting, aside from the geometric questions. Some of the contests are purely multiple choice and others you'll need to provide long solutions for.

I have written a few of these contests myself and I really enjoyed them. I recommend that all of you who are interested in Mathematics to try them out. It would also be a good idea to practice beforehand, so that you know how long each section will take. I usually practiced in the past by solving questions from their previous contests, but they also have a Contest Preparation section on their website. If you're between grades 9 to 11, I suggest you go through their Pascal, Cayley and Fermat eWorkshop. If you're in grade 12 or even in university, have a look at their Euclid eWorkshop. These eWorkshops are designed to help students adapt their way of thinking in terms of Mathematical logic and reasoning to something that is somewhat different from what they were taught in schools. Even if you might achieve high grades in your regular Math class, that won't ensure you achieving a high score on the contest itself.

Interestingly enough, I found that their lower grade contest questions (those between grades 9 to 11), tend to use basic Mathematical concepts which you have developed when you were in elementary school, except that they don't seem so explicit. So before going into these contests, it's important to have a strong foundation of pre-algebra because that is what you will mostly be tested on. They might ask you a few questions related to some course material which you might have learned throughout high school, but for the majority of the contest they won't. I created a page on my website which contains links to all sorts of different levels of Mathematics and topics related to it, that can be found here.

Additional links for learning are provided on the Waterloo's Open Courseware website:

One last thing, I am still going to write about technology and stuff of that sort and other casual stuff. But because I have more time now, I will try to write more about things related to Mathematics if I can. The idea of writing explanations/solutions sound quite intriguing to me, however, I'm not so sure how many of you would actually want to read it, so I might not even post about that. I tend to spend a lot of time doing it at home; I just never get the chance to actually post about it. I have also put up new guides on my website that I have recently been working on, so have a look at those if you're interested. And if some of you were wondering why I haven't posted at all this month, it's because I was taking some time off and was mostly spending time with my family.