As the more astute among you will notice, this is my new blog. The reason for this is quite simple: after the site migration, I discovered that post-specific permissions were no longer possible, and I left my old blog private as a result.

I'm not entirely sure what I hope to use this blog for, as its creation very nearly coincides with the end of my high school career. As some of you know, I'll be headed to MIT in an amount of time that can effectively be described as "momentarily", so perhaps I'll stick to my original intentions of talking about that a lot. Mostly, however, I don't feel like I'm quite ready to leave the world of competitive mathematics just yet, and this blog provides a connection - however indirect and tenuous - to that culture. Really this will probably just be a place to toss out some stream-of-consciousness stuff when I feel somewhat emotional or unusually productive.

Of course, my connection to math competitions is one that will never really be broken. It's impossible to simply distance oneself from something that they've been pursuing for over a decade, and it's simply impractical to try. Regardless of what happens from here, my time within the realm of AoPS will forever shape my future. Nor will I become detached from this site in the future; my role is simply shifting from enthusiastic participant to wizened old TA. I should digress here for a moment: the last few months working with AoPS have been some of the most rewarding of my mathematics career. I get to see - and directly interact with - hundreds of kids who, quite literally, are the future of mathematics. In a class I'm TAing now, the instructor mentioned that he remembered me from a class he taught here around 8-9 years ago . It's extremely humbling and gratifying to realize that, somewhere down the road, I may very well recognize names from classes I helped assist.

Along those lines, I was fortunate to briefly speak with some of the top middle schoolers at ARML this weekend. Of course, they were more concerned with insisting they were fat and seeing who could wrap their hands around their legs, but the scene took me back - if only for a brief moment - to my glory days of MATHCOUNTS et al, when my primary concerns were less about major life decisions and more about who was fatter (sidebar: why is "fat" such a universal term in the math competition sphere?). I left (or, more accurately, they ran off to "Chipotle") without a very good idea of what exactly room 604 meant, but their sheer enthusiasm reminded me of what I'm leaving behind.

Another conversation I had this weekend was, basically, me nodding a lot while I was treated to a primer on investment banking. It's not a field I have much interest in, but that same enthusiasm that I experienced in the fatness debates made it impossible not to be interested. At the same time, it reminded me of how different things had become: instead of trying to sneak a pizza around and talking about AMCs, here we were - quite literally - talking about our careers. Growing up is terrifying.

Anyway, enough of me complaining about biological processes - on to ARML. As the final math competition of my life (Putnam exists, but to be totally honest I'm not that enthusiastic about it), I really cared about the results and put a serious effort into preparation. This seemed to be rather unusual among my friend circle, who were probably correct in focusing on more important matters, but I wanted to go out - for lack of a better term - with a bang. Unfortunately, we failed in my main goal of reaching the top 10 - a feat we've accomplished just once in recent memory - largely due to lackluster performances on the team and individual rounds. This was largely due to a completely failed strategy on the former of those two, in which our stronger members focused exclusively on the later questions, and failed to produce a positive number of points. In particular, 2 of our 4 strongest spent the entire round failing to solve #10, and I blew both #8 and #9 (apparently doesn't actually have two solutions despite the discriminant being 0, and I never really got close on #9). Somehow we ended up failing both #6 and #7 as well, despite many checks, and ended up with a truly... well, pathetic 5/10.

Power went much better; I personally did all of #6 and #7. However, we didn't end up getting most of #8, and we discovered afterwards that we had fakesolved #5. This left us with a 37, which wasn't too bad but well below what we needed to make up the team round. Individuals were rather demoralizing from the start, as we had just 19/30 on the first pair and little improvement from there. It almost seemed like we were making a comeback on the relay round (!!!) with our 21/25 on the first portion, but we were quickly returned to our ground state with just 3/25 on the next one (in which I didn't believe could actually be an answer to an ARML relay, didn't check my computation carefully, and realized just before the 6-minute mark that it was in fact ). This echoed #6 on the individual round, in which I didn't really believe that could be right because it was a pretty random number, but I wrote it anyway with ~15 seconds left (which I also did on #9 due to thinking were the side lengths in that order and not catching that until ~15 seconds left). Also, highly amusingly, one of our #2s passed back the sum of the side lengths of a rectangle instead of the perimeter (a common mistake on that relay), thus accidentally halving the answer. Fortunately for us, yugrey accidentally calculated the area of a triangle as , thus effectively doubling the passed answer. Give those men some medals.

Somehow we managed to finish as high as 14th, but it was quite a disappointing result nonetheless. On the bright side, I made it to tiebreakers for the first time - something that I had figured was so improbable that I didn't bother setting it as a personal goal. I also didn't realize they called my name for a while due to applause from other members obfuscating the sound, so that was mildly awkward as well. Even more awkward, however, was my brief conversation with nsun48, in which I legitimately thought he was ksun48 until sitting down for the problem. Oops. Anyway, as soon as I read the problem I figured that ARML was trying to be tricky and would be negative, which basically solved the problem as the entire point was remember that could be negative. However, I misremembered as (which is another perfect power - - so I get them confused), and then paniced when I realized might be the answer, but then I realized is definitely not 243 and correctly submitted at something like 1:55.

Evidently that was fast enough to break into the top 20, though not fast enough to match Wolstenholme's 16 seconds, which was an extremely satisfying end to a very long (this was my 9th ARML) math career. I actually don't think we've had a top individual in recent memory (at least not within the last 10 years), despite having many tiebreaker participants, so - finally - those endless hours of speed-training FTW paid off

And so, for me at least, the end of an era has arrived. My final year was certainly a rousing success by most measures (top individual performances at PUMaC [which included 2nd place team], ARML, top ~50 USAMO, etc.), so my swan song was - quite fortunately - a successful one. At the same time, however, the close of this chapter leaves a large gaping void in my life, one not dissimilar to loss. I, for one, am quite interested in seeing what shows up to fill it.

In other news, I recently came out of pseudo-retirement in chess, having an incredible result at the Philadelphia Open to pick up a ton of rating points (and an unofficial IM norm in the process, just short of a GM one). A couple more solid performances later, and now I'm sporting an absurdly high 2456 rating. Certainly this is not something I had expected by any stretch of the imagination - it wasn't that long ago that I was floating over and under 2400 - but now it seems that I might be obligated to pursue a quest to GM once more. Two tournaments at the end of this month (and the beginning of next), the DC international and the World Open, will provide excellent barometers for me to see if I'm the beneficiary of an auspiciously-timed fluke, or if there's something deeper lurking. Could it really be that I'm not the worst IM in the world?