ka March Highlights and 2025 AoPS Online Class Information
jlacosta0
Mar 2, 2025
March is the month for State MATHCOUNTS competitions! Kudos to everyone who participated in their local chapter competitions and best of luck to all going to State! Join us on March 11th for a Math Jam devoted to our favorite Chapter competition problems! Are you interested in training for MATHCOUNTS? Be sure to check out our AMC 8/MATHCOUNTS Basics and Advanced courses.
Are you ready to level up with Olympiad training? Registration is open with early bird pricing available for our WOOT programs: MathWOOT (Levels 1 and 2), CodeWOOT, PhysicsWOOT, and ChemWOOT. What is WOOT? WOOT stands for Worldwide Online Olympiad Training and is a 7-month high school math Olympiad preparation and testing program that brings together many of the best students from around the world to learn Olympiad problem solving skills. Classes begin in September!
Do you have plans this summer? There are so many options to fit your schedule and goals whether attending a summer camp or taking online classes, it can be a great break from the routine of the school year. Check out our summer courses at AoPS Online, or if you want a math or language arts class that doesn’t have homework, but is an enriching summer experience, our AoPS Virtual Campus summer camps may be just the ticket! We are expanding our locations for our AoPS Academies across the country with 15 locations so far and new campuses opening in Saratoga CA, Johns Creek GA, and the Upper West Side NY. Check out this page for summer camp information.
Be sure to mark your calendars for the following events:
[list][*]March 5th (Wednesday), 4:30pm PT/7:30pm ET, HCSSiM Math Jam 2025. Amber Verser, Assistant Director of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, will host an information session about HCSSiM, a summer program for high school students.
[*]March 6th (Thursday), 4:00pm PT/7:00pm ET, Free Webinar on Math Competitions from elementary through high school. Join us for an enlightening session that demystifies the world of math competitions and helps you make informed decisions about your contest journey.
[*]March 11th (Tuesday), 4:30pm PT/7:30pm ET, 2025 MATHCOUNTS Chapter Discussion MATH JAM. AoPS instructors will discuss some of their favorite problems from the MATHCOUNTS Chapter Competition. All are welcome!
[*]March 13th (Thursday), 4:00pm PT/7:00pm ET, Free Webinar about Summer Camps at the Virtual Campus. Transform your summer into an unforgettable learning adventure! From elementary through high school, we offer dynamic summer camps featuring topics in mathematics, language arts, and competition preparation - all designed to fit your schedule and ignite your passion for learning.[/list]
Our full course list for upcoming classes is below:
All classes run 7:30pm-8:45pm ET/4:30pm - 5:45pm PT unless otherwise noted.
Prealgebra 1
Sunday, Mar 2 - Jun 22
Friday, Mar 28 - Jul 18
Sunday, Apr 13 - Aug 10
Tuesday, May 13 - Aug 26
Thursday, May 29 - Sep 11
Sunday, Jun 15 - Oct 12
Monday, Jun 30 - Oct 20
Wednesday, Jul 16 - Oct 29
Prealgebra 2
Tuesday, Mar 25 - Jul 8
Sunday, Apr 13 - Aug 10
Wednesday, May 7 - Aug 20
Monday, Jun 2 - Sep 22
Sunday, Jun 29 - Oct 26
Friday, Jul 25 - Nov 21
Introduction to Algebra A
Sunday, Mar 23 - Jul 20
Monday, Apr 7 - Jul 28
Sunday, May 11 - Sep 14 (1:00 - 2:30 pm ET/10:00 - 11:30 am PT)
Wednesday, May 14 - Aug 27
Friday, May 30 - Sep 26
Monday, Jun 2 - Sep 22
Sunday, Jun 15 - Oct 12
Thursday, Jun 26 - Oct 9
Tuesday, Jul 15 - Oct 28
Introduction to Counting & Probability
Sunday, Mar 16 - Jun 8
Wednesday, Apr 16 - Jul 2
Thursday, May 15 - Jul 31
Sunday, Jun 1 - Aug 24
Thursday, Jun 12 - Aug 28
Wednesday, Jul 9 - Sep 24
Sunday, Jul 27 - Oct 19
Introduction to Number Theory
Monday, Mar 17 - Jun 9
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Friday, May 9 - Aug 1
Wednesday, May 21 - Aug 6
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Tuesday, Jul 15 - Sep 30
Introduction to Algebra B
Sunday, Mar 2 - Jun 22
Wednesday, Apr 16 - Jul 30
Tuesday, May 6 - Aug 19
Wednesday, Jun 4 - Sep 17
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Friday, Jul 18 - Nov 14
Introduction to Geometry
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Intermediate: Grades 8-12
Intermediate Algebra
Sunday, Mar 16 - Sep 14
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Monday, Apr 21 - Oct 13
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Tuesday, Jun 10 - Nov 18
Wednesday, Jun 25 - Dec 10
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MATHCOUNTS/AMC 8 Basics
Sunday, Mar 23 - Jun 15
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Friday, May 23 - Aug 15
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Sunday, Jun 22 - Sep 21
Tues & Thurs, Jul 8 - Aug 14 (meets twice a week!)
MATHCOUNTS/AMC 8 Advanced
Friday, Apr 11 - Jun 27
Sunday, May 11 - Aug 10
Tuesday, May 27 - Aug 12
Wednesday, Jun 11 - Aug 27
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Tues & Thurs, Jul 8 - Aug 14 (meets twice a week!)
AMC 10 Problem Series
Tuesday, Mar 4 - May 20
Monday, Mar 31 - Jun 23
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Monday, Jun 23 - Sep 15
Tues & Thurs, Jul 8 - Aug 14 (meets twice a week!)
AMC 10 Final Fives
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AMC 12 Problem Series
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Introduction to Programming with Python
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Thursday, May 22 - Aug 7
Sunday, Jun 15 - Sep 14 (1:00 - 2:30 pm ET/10:00 - 11:30 am PT)
Tuesday, Jun 17 - Sep 2
Monday, Jun 30 - Sep 22
Many of our AoPS Community members share their knowledge with their peers in a variety of ways, ranging from creating mock contests to creating real contests to writing handouts to hosting sessions as part of our partnership with schoolhouse.world.
To facilitate students in these efforts, we have created a new Peer-to-Peer Programs forum. With the creation of this forum, we are starting a new process for those of you who want to advertise your efforts. These advertisements and ensuing discussions have been cluttering up some of the forums that were meant for other purposes, so we’re gathering these topics in one place. This also allows students to find new peer-to-peer learning opportunities without having to poke around all the other forums.
To announce your program, or to invite others to work with you on it, here’s what to do:
1) Post a new topic in the Peer-to-Peer Programs forum. This will be the discussion thread for your program.
2) Post a single brief post in this thread that links the discussion thread of your program in the Peer-to-Peer Programs forum.
Please note that we’ll move or delete any future advertisement posts that are outside the Peer-to-Peer Programs forum, as well as any posts in this topic that are not brief announcements of new opportunities. In particular, this topic should not be used to discuss specific programs; those discussions should occur in topics in the Peer-to-Peer Programs forum.
Your post in this thread should have what you're sharing (class, session, tutoring, handout, math or coding game/other program) and a link to the thread in the Peer-to-Peer Programs forum, which should have more information (like where to find what you're sharing).
The purpose of this post is to lay out a few suggestions about what kind of posts work well for the C&P forum. Except in a few cases these are mostly meant to be "suggestions based on historical trends" rather than firm hard rules; we may eventually replace this with an actual list of firm rules but that requires admin approval :) That said, if you post something in the "discouraged" category, you should not be totally surprised if it gets locked; they are discouraged exactly because past experience shows they tend to go badly.
----------------------------- 1. Program discussion: Allowed
If you have questions about specific camps or programs (e.g. which classes are good at X camp?), these questions fit well here. Many camps/programs have specific sub-forums too but we understand a lot of them are not active.
----------------------------- 2. Results discussion: Allowed
You can make threads about e.g. how you did on contests (including AMC), though on AMC day when there is a lot of discussion. Moderators and administrators may do a lot of thread-merging / forum-wrangling to keep things in one place.
----------------------------- 3. Reposting solutions or questions to past AMC/AIME/USAMO problems: Allowed
This forum contains a post for nearly every problem from AMC8, AMC10, AMC12, AIME, USAJMO, USAMO (and these links give you an index of all these posts). It is always permitted to post a full solution to any problem in its own thread (linked above), regardless of how old the problem is, and even if this solution is similar to one that has already been posted. We encourage this type of posting because it is helpful for the user to explain their solution in full to an audience, and for future users who want to see multiple approaches to a problem or even just the frequency distribution of common approaches. We do ask for some explanation; if you just post "the answer is (B); ez" then you are not adding anything useful.
You are also encouraged to post questions about a specific problem in the specific thread for that problem, or about previous user's solutions. It's almost always better to use the existing thread than to start a new one, to keep all the discussion in one place easily searchable for future visitors.
----------------------------- 4. Advice posts: Allowed, but read below first
You can use this forum to ask for advice about how to prepare for math competitions in general. But you should be aware that this question has been asked many many times. Before making a post, you are encouraged to look at the following:
[list]
[*] Stop looking for the right training: A generic post about advice that keeps getting stickied :)
[*] There is an enormous list of links on the Wiki of books / problems / etc for all levels.
[/list]
When you do post, we really encourage you to be as specific as possible in your question. Tell us about your background, what you've tried already, etc.
Actually, the absolute best way to get a helpful response is to take a few examples of problems that you tried to solve but couldn't, and explain what you tried on them / why you couldn't solve them. Here is a great example of a specific question.
----------------------------- 5. Publicity: use P2P forum instead
See https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c5h2489297_peertopeer_programs_forum.
Some exceptions have been allowed in the past, but these require approval from administrators. (I am not totally sure what the criteria is. I am not an administrator.)
----------------------------- 6. Mock contests: use Mock Contests forum instead
Mock contests should be posted in the dedicated forum instead: https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c594864_aops_mock_contests
----------------------------- 7. AMC procedural questions: suggest to contact the AMC HQ instead
If you have a question like "how do I submit a change of venue form for the AIME" or "why is my name not on the qualifiers list even though I have a 300 index", you would be better off calling or emailing the AMC program to ask, they are the ones who can help you :)
----------------------------- 8. Discussion of random math problems: suggest to use MSM/HSM/HSO instead
If you are discussing a specific math problem that isn't from the AMC/AIME/USAMO, it's better to post these in Middle School Math, High School Math, High School Olympiads instead.
----------------------------- 9. Politics: suggest to use Round Table instead
There are important conversations to be had about things like gender diversity in math contests, etc., for sure. However, from experience we think that C&P is historically not a good place to have these conversations, as they go off the rails very quickly. We encourage you to use the Round Table instead, where it is much more clear that all posts need to be serious.
----------------------------- 10. MAA complaints: discouraged
We don't want to pretend that the MAA is perfect or that we agree with everything they do. However, we chose to discourage this sort of behavior because in practice most of the comments we see are not useful and some are frankly offensive.
[list] [*] If you just want to blow off steam, do it on your blog instead.
[*] When you have criticism, it should be reasoned, well-thought and constructive. What we mean by this is, for example, when the AOIME was announced, there was great outrage about potential cheating. Well, do you really think that this is something the organizers didn't think about too? Simply posting that "people will cheat and steal my USAMOO qualification, the MAA are idiots!" is not helpful as it is not bringing any new information to the table.
[*] Even if you do have reasoned, well-thought, constructive criticism, we think it is actually better to email it the MAA instead, rather than post it here. Experience shows that even polite, well-meaning suggestions posted in C&P are often derailed by less mature users who insist on complaining about everything.
[/list]
----------------------------- 11. Memes and joke posts: discouraged
It's fine to make jokes or lighthearted posts every so often. But it should be done with discretion. Ideally, jokes should be done within a longer post that has other content. For example, in my response to one user's question about olympiad combinatorics, I used a silly picture of Sogiita Gunha, but it was done within a context of a much longer post where it was meant to actually make a point.
On the other hand, there are many threads which consist largely of posts whose only content is an attached meme with the word "MAA" in it. When done in excess like this, the jokes reflect poorly on the community, so we explicitly discourage them.
----------------------------- 12. Questions that no one can answer: discouraged
Examples of this: "will MIT ask for AOIME scores?", "what will the AIME 2021 cutoffs be (asked in 2020)", etc. Basically, if you ask a question on this forum, it's better if the question is something that a user can plausibly answer :)
----------------------------- 13. Blind speculation: discouraged
Along these lines, if you do see a question that you don't have an answer to, we discourage "blindly guessing" as it leads to spreading of baseless rumors. For example, if you see some user posting "why are there fewer qualifiers than usual this year?", you should not reply "the MAA must have been worried about online cheating so they took fewer people!!". Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
----------------------------- 14. Discussion of cheating: strongly discouraged
If you have evidence or reasonable suspicion of cheating, please report this to your Competition Manager or to the AMC HQ; these forums cannot help you.
Otherwise, please avoid public discussion of cheating. That is: no discussion of methods of cheating, no speculation about how cheating affects cutoffs, and so on --- it is not helpful to anyone, and it creates a sour atmosphere. A longer explanation is given in Seriously, please stop discussing how to cheat.
----------------------------- 15. Cutoff jokes: never allowed
Whenever the cutoffs for any major contest are released, it is very obvious when they are official. In the past, this has been achieved by the numbers being posted on the official AMC website (here) or through a post from the AMCDirector account.
You must never post fake cutoffs, even as a joke. You should also refrain from posting cutoffs that you've heard of via email, etc., because it is better to wait for the obvious official announcement. A longer explanation is given in A Treatise on Cutoff Trolling.
----------------------------- 16. Meanness: never allowed Being mean is worse than being immature and unproductive. If another user does something which you think is inappropriate, use the Report button to bring the post to moderator attention, or if you really must reply, do so in a way that is tactful and constructive rather than inflammatory.
-----------------------------
While we do allow advertisements of official contests (at the MAA and MATHCOUNTS level) and those run by college students with at least one successful year, any and all advertisements of a paid service or program is not allowed and will be deleted.
Disclaimer: this entire post is my opinion based solely on my own experiences. I happen to do a lot of teaching, so if you have thoughts or opinions of your own, please do share - I could use them. :)
Recently I've seen a bunch of improvement threads come up which I feel can be answered in more or less the same way. Rather than post a reply to each of these I decided I'd just make a separate topic and hope people read/link it.
I'm going to start by reposting something I wrote at the end of last year: [quote="v_Enhance"]In general, I think once you figure out what you're trying to improve then it doesn't make a big difference whether you do ARML vs Mandelbrot vs NIMO vs OMO or whatever.[/quote] In retrospect I should have bolded this sentence, because it was one of the main points I was trying to make: the choice of what book/problems you choose to do really doesn't matter. The only book I've ever read more than half of was Volume 2. WOOT was helpful when I started really getting serious about olympiads because it filled in various knowledge gaps (e.g. complex numbers), but beyond that my training basically consists of doing random problems from the contest section. (I don't even bother to pick topics.)
This is why I feel the extensive discussion over "which chapters of Volume 1 are most important", "which tests are about the same difficulty as X", "breakdown of AMC10 topics", et cetera, get more attention than they deserve. Really, I think that once you know the fundamentals -- and there aren't that many -- only a few things actually make a difference during practice:
[list=1]
[*]Difficulty of problems. Specifically, do hard problems when you get the chance. Doing easy problems makes you faster and less prone to errors but does nothing to help expand the range of problems you can solve. So, do hard problems, and don't worry about time until later. (I have fond memories of USAMTS for that.) Of course, this is something that should be done during the academic year, and not right before a major contest.
[*]Building intuition. See this. Particularly the third point, which I think applies in full force to any level of competition. The really important thing to see is that people don't pull solutions to hard problems out of thin air; there's a thought process behind it all. MOPpers don't solve problems just because they were born with some innate talent; they've built an intuition from doing lots and lots of hard problems.[/list]
Beyond that it just comes down to doing enough problems. Speed/careless issues are things that you should practice for sometimes, but not most of the time, and definitely not exclusively.
In closing, some little things for people who are just starting out with contests:
[list=1]
[*]Don't cram. Just relax on the couple days before the contest. I find Starbucks Coffee a good, free way to relax.
[*]Don't take contests too seriously. For me the best part about these contests has always been getting to know other really cool people, and we're all getting together this weekend![/list]
The following exercise was posted -two months ago- on the Website StackExchange; cf.
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/5006488/image-of-the-squaring-function-on-mathcalm-2-mathbbq
There was no solution on Stack.
-Statement of the exercise-
We consider the matrix function .
Find the image of .
In other words, give a method to decide whether a given matrix has or does not have at least a square root
in ; if the answer is yes, then give a method to calculate at least one of its roots.
Let be an integer. Rowan and Colin play a game on an grid of squares, where each square is colored either red or blue. Rowan is allowed to permute the rows of the grid and Colin is allowed to permute the columns. A grid coloring is orderly if: [list] [*]no matter how Rowan permutes the rows of the coloring, Colin can then permute the columns to restore the original grid coloring; and [*]no matter how Colin permutes the columns of the coloring, Rowan can then permute the rows to restore the original grid coloring. [/list] In terms of , how many orderly colorings are there?
Let and be positive integers. The cells of an grid are colored amber and bronze such that there are at least amber cells and at least bronze cells. Prove that it is possible to choose amber cells and bronze cells such that no two of the chosen cells lie in the same row or column.
Kei draws a -by- grid. He colors of the unit squares silver and the remaining squares gold. Kei then folds the grid in half vertically, forming pairs of overlapping unit squares. Let and equal equal the least and greatest possible number of gold-on-gold pairs, respectively. What is the value of ?
I'm nearly in high school now but only average like 75 on AMC 10 sadly. I want to get better so I'm doing like the first 11 questions of previous AMC 10's almost every day because I also did previous years for AMC 8. Is there any specific way to get better scores and understand more difficult problems past AMC 8? I have almost no trouble with AMC 8 problem given enough time (like 23-24 right with enough time).
Consider an -by- board of unit squares for some odd positive integer . We say that a collection of identical dominoes is a maximal grid-aligned configuration on the board if consists of dominoes where each domino covers exactly two neighboring squares and the dominoes don't overlap: then covers all but one square on the board. We are allowed to slide (but not rotate) a domino on the board to cover the uncovered square, resulting in a new maximal grid-aligned configuration with another square uncovered. Let be the number of distinct maximal grid-aligned configurations obtainable from by repeatedly sliding dominoes. Find the maximum value of as a function of .