ORMC Meetings • 2024-2025 Academic Year

We will start the quarter by solving math problems that are not centered around any particular theme.

Students will solve problems around the famous Arithmetic Mean - Geometric Mean inequality.

One of the Olympiads instructors, Nikita Gladkov, has recently disproved an important combinatorial hypothesis, known as the bunkbed conjecture. He has made a handout where his work is broken into problems, giving students a chance to rediscover the result.

A generating function is a clothesline on which we hang up a sequence of numbers for display. We will learn to do combinatorics with the help of algebra.

We will solve problems in geometry of varying difficulty

We will have a special event, named My Favorite Math Competition Problem, to honor Tiger (Qiao) Zhang winning gold medal at the International Math Olympiad in 2024. Four speakers will each present their favorite math competition problem, including a solution and necessary mathematical background.

We will solve some problems that illustrate the philosophy of looking for narrow places

We will learn to restore a polynomial by its values. The class will take place in zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/99674950379?pwd=lbyNmXuH8rK9ZhEBIbqwAABmAUk5Tz.1

We continue the same handout

We will learn the definition and basic uses of squares modulo primes

We will solve problems by looking at asymptotic behaviour of sequences

We will solve some basic and advanced functional equations -- a topic frequent in advanced math olympiads

The last class of the quarter! We will have a lecture about the mathematics surrounding sudoku followed by problem solving.

We will study the curves of degree 2 and 3 and their natural habitat -- projective plane