This is the personal website of Jason Zhang.
Long time no see, huh?
Well, I spent the start of my Spring going to my first notable travel competition related to mathematics (that is, CMIMC). I’ve been on a fair bit of travel competitions related to competitive programming and the likes, but I’ve never actually gone for a math travel competition. This is mostly due to the fact that I am terrible at competition math. Nevertheless, this was a really memorable experience and cool things ended up happening regardless.
To begin, I suppose I should note how I even got here. For CMIMC, my school’s math team does not send people purely based on competition ranking, instead opting for a more “holistic” viewpoint. I was invited quite late, but nevertheless I still got a spot. The CMIMC Math competition consists of several parts:
The Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) Round was my best bet at getting anything. I had done a great deal of study relating to theoretical computer science in my free time, although to be fair it wouldn’t be of much use here. The TCS problems are more akin to general “power”/proof round questions. Specifically, one receives ~3 questions in which one must optimize some factor as much as possible with proof provided. There is no need for theoretical computer science knowledge background, one could get a high score regardless if they know big-\(\Theta\) or type theory. However, despite not being obligated in any sense to win anything, there was a subtle pressure to at least perform decently well on this round. To be honest, the only person enforcing this pressure was myself. That is definitely not a good thing, but I digress as this is not a blog about my mental health.
Well, I had just finished taking my linear algebra test and I headed straight to the bus. The bus ride would be about 4 hours, and we would have to skip all of the CMIMC day 1 activities (which wasn’t all that much). Now, I had told myself that I was going to be productive on this trip. Most of my school work was done or wasn’t going to be priority, I was going to work on the numerous personal projects that I had been falling behind on. And I suppose, to an extent, I was somewhat productive. But I think I might’ve typed up like a paragraph in total (at least for my personal projects, I was decently productive on some other assignment). On the bus, I tried to do some work but I kept getting distracted by the seventeen different things happening at once, so in the end I barely got anything done. The rest of the day was just usual banter and shenanigans with friends.
After arriving to campus, we checked in and waited for the TCS round to start. A lot of alumni were there helping host which was pretty cool even if I barely knew them. My team consisted of three seniors and three juniors (which included me), and four of us had pretty extensive CS experience (as in, we were all active members of the computer team).
So, I worked on problem 3 with a friend (which turned out to be the easiest problem). The TCS round lasts for 90 mintues, and we spend the first hour getting some preliminary ideas about how to solve our problem. We had decided that we were going to go for the tightest bound (which awarded the most points). I actually did end up using some theoretical CS knowledge, that being I used an adversarial argument for a lower bound (albiet, it was completely non-essiental). Anyways, we had devised the general proof-scheme and our strategy, so we spent the last 30 minutes refining and writing. Well, I wrote most of it which was an interesting choice considering my handwriting is like that of an unreadable ancient script. However, I locked in and wrote somewhat-legibly, although there is a chance that the organizers now think that there was a third grader on my team because of my uncanny writing. Self-slander aside, I wasn’t sure how tight the grading was going to be so I made sure to cover the cases very explicitly and I was being somewhat redundant so that we wouldn’t lose silly points. However, that was a time sink so towards the end the proof became… less descriptive. I learned after the fact that all of the detail was not necessary as the graders didn’t care that much. I believe we probably got close to full score on problem 3.
I believe we got full score on problem 1, thanks to the hard work of the computer team co-captain1. There was some mishap on problem 2 so we only earned partial credit, but I can’t complain as I would’ve done a hunderd times worse. Of course, one could start dreaming about how they might’ve done better if some mistake didn’t occur but that is a completely unproductive way of thinking and honestly I was only involved with the easiest problem so I have no room to speak.
Now, these team round questions were far closer to standard competition math problems. And I was the most useless man alive. I spent all my time working on a problem that I didn’t even solve… Not because the problem was particularly difficult either, because a teammate decided to help out in the last 10 minutes and basically would’ve solved it if not for some arithmetical error. So yeah…
Now, there were three individual rounds. I made a really dumb mistake on Algebra/Number Theory, but so did a lot of other people so I don’t feel all too bad. On the other hand, we will not be discussing the horrors done on the Geometry section. Whatever you are thinking, I did worse. The combinatorics section wasn’t all too bad, although I was pretty tired from the other three rounds.
As I said previously, there were other events to go to. However, our school could not participate as our scheduling did not permit it. I went out for dinner with a few friends, but we were quite indecisive and ended up all over the place. Eventually, we settled for a place called the Porch which was pretty nice. I had a lovely conversation with the folks with me, but the award ceremony was scheduled to 7:00, and we were inching ever closer. We made a run back, going against Google Map’s advice and accidently taking the long route, but we got back… like 7 minutes late.
I thought we missed it because we were taking team photos, but turns out the awards ceremony got delayed. After awhile longer, we began the awards ceremony. My team got 7th on TCS! Yay! I’m personally quite happy with this result, it was the highest TCS placement for our school. Besides that, another team from my school got several placements both individually and overall so congratulations to them2!
When I got home, it was almost 2:00 AM, I was tired (maybe even a bit sick), but I can confidently say that this was overall a very big net positive trip. A lot of things happened that I can’t properly condense into a blog post, and I think I did quite well for my first ever competition math trip. Big thanks to every single person along the ride. I hope I can come back next year!