Can you best a math Olympiad? Test your skills with the world’s largest database of problems.
Popular Science...
In 1959, countries around the world sent their most talented students to Romania to compete in the first-ever International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Ever since, the rules have remained simple, even if the problems are not: over two days, each team works to solve a total of six math problems. After nearly 70 years, contenders from the United States, China, and Luxembourg have achieved a perfect score in various years. But while each year’s competition focuses on only six problems, there has long been another side to the IMO.
“Every country brings a booklet of its most novel and most creative problems,” explained Shaden Alshammari, a mathematician at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “They share the booklets with each other, but no one [has] made the effort to collect them, clean them, and upload them online.”
Alshammari and her colleagues have finally changed that with MathNet, the world’s largest repository for proof-based math problems. With over 30,000 questions and their solutions from 47 countries, MathNet is five times larger than the previous record-holder. It’s also a major step forward for representation when it comes to mathematical perspectives and approaches to problem-solving.
“I remember so many students for whom it was an individual effort. No one in their country was training them for this kind of competition,” said Alshammari. “We hope this gives them a centralized place with high-quality problems and solutions to learn from.”
It took decades of work to reach this pivotal moment. Since 2006, IMO member and MathNet collaborator Navid Safaei has scoured global sources to collect archival booklets. Much of his own individual work helped bolster the dataset, which now includes 1,595 PDF scans of physical documents encompassing over 25,000 pages.
MathNet is already available for free to the public through MIT CSAIL. You may not understand most, if not all, of the problems—but the resource may prove invaluable to the next whiz kid out there.
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