| Want to learn how to tackle those tough MATHCOUNTS and AMC counting and probability problems? Check out Art of Problem Solving's Introduction to Counting & Probability by David Patrick. |
Below are some articles of interest to students of problem solving. We expect to add more occasionally, so come back every once in a while.
You will also find useful articles in many of our Community Weblogs, particularly that of Art of Problem Solving instructor Richard Rusczyk. Also, the AoPSWiki contains hundreds of articles about mathematics, competitions, and other topics of interest to student problem solvers.
Articles for Olympiad Students |
Award Winning
Papers |
Below are papers by Art of Problem Solving Community members that won awards in major high school research competitions. Many readers may find the mathematics in these papers tough to follow; we share them to give students an idea what is expected of top papers in competitions such as the Siemens Competition, the Intel Science Search, and the Davidson Fellows Program.
On the expected winding number of a random walk on the unit lattice by Yi Sun, who won a $75,000 scholarship in the Intel Science Talent Search.
Cayley graphs formed by conjugate generating sets of Sn by Jacob Steinhardt, who won a $40,000 scholarship in the Siemens Competition.
Asymptotic behavior of certain Ducci sequences by Greg Brockman, who won a $25,000 scholarship in the Intel Competition.
Character sums and Ramsey properties of generalized Paley graphs by Nicholas Wage, who won a $25,000 scholarship in the Intel Competition.
Student
Papers |
Below are papers written by students. If you have a paper you'd like to submit for consideration, please contact us. Note that the paper should be in PDF format for submission. We do not expect all papers to be as advanced as the ones below!
A Proof of Heron's Formula by Miles Edwards. An innovative proof of Heron's Formula. This article was published in American Mathematical Monthly.
A Powerful Technique for Proving Remarkable Trigonometric Identities by Zach Abel and Fred Sala. A challenging article on trigonometric manipulation and cyclotomic polynomials.
Polyominoes by Amanda Beeson, Thomas Belulovich, Connie Chao, Jon Chu, Eric Frackleton, Li-Mei Lim, Travis Mandel. Learn some cool counting methods by reading the authors' exploration of various classes of polyominoes.
Partitions of Integers by Joseph Laurendi. A variety of problem solving approaches for problems involving partitions.
A Few Elementary Properties of Polynomials by Adeel Khan. Includes many applications to AIME and Olympiad problems.
Predicting Improper Fractional Base Integer Characteristics by Billy Dorminy, written for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

