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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I have a social group of folks that work out hard integrals via social media -- friends and friends of friends over the years in quant jobs and graduate school where we work on fun things.

This author obviously knows this at a deeper level, especially the academic literature, where our group is more raw about it. So fun. Thanks to the author and the poster for a pleasant Friday afternoon read.

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If I may ask, do you have any book which has solutions of some of these hard integrals so that one can get a knack of ways to solve them than just start from first principles like by-parts ? Nntaleb and his twitter followers also often discuss solutions by methods which were not taught in Calculus 2.

It would be great idea to see one such book if it doesn't exist.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1041720/great-books...

Thanks for sharing :)

Almost Impossible Integrations, Sums, and Series is a nice one.

Thanks for sharing :)

> I have a social group of folks that work out hard integrals via social media

Heh heh! Glad am not the only one. I used to think this was purely an Asian habit, borne out of excessive focus on math problems during the 11-12 grades in order to pass the grueling entrance exams. I mostly share pdfs of math problems with former classmates thru linkedin.

Any chance I could get in on this? Sounds like a lot of fun and I love chatting about interesting math problems and meeting like-minded folks!

Well, I live in the midwest, a small republican town in flyover country, with no fancypants private schools nearby :) The kids here go to public school. I thought I can help them out. So I volunteered my "math services" to the public school teachers & set up a side project website, weekly 1-1 math sessions. Long story short - this year three 6th graders I work with ended up acing the AMC 10, which is a contest that American kids take in the 10th grade. One of them even made the AIME cutoff, which is the top 1% i.e. top 3000 of the 300,000 contestants. So I'm thinking of increasing my efforts in that direction. Maybe host a math contest forum for working adults where we can work on interesting integrals & suchlike :) Lemme know what you think, perhaps we can collab.

EDIT: apparently the dictionary supports "acing" to mean "doing very well" even if there are clearly higher measures of performance. Still, "acing" generally means "the highest rank" which would at least be the Distinguished Honor Roll (approx 125-130) if you don't want to go all the way to exact 100% score.

Original post:

> three 6th graders I work with ended up acing the AMC 10, which is a contest that American kids take in the 10th grade. One of them even made the AIME cutoff,

This is 100% impossible. How could you "ace" a contest and not qualify for the lext level? No one did better than "acing" and there is no lottery.

Do you mean "100" on the AMC 10, not "acing" ? That's impressive and plausible, but "acing" is 150, which is achieved by only about 10 people in the world each year, and takes years of intense study, and all of them qualify for the AIME.

Also, AIME is currently top 2.5% of AMC 10, not top 1%.

Score reports at: http://amc-reg.maa.org/reports/GeneralReports.aspx

> "acing" is 150

Sorry, I meant acing in the "scored way above what I'd expect 6th graders to do" sense. One of them made the AIME cutoff, two missed that cutoff but quite narrowly.

> "acing" is 150, which is achieved by only about 10 people in the world each year

Agreed, that is pretty impressive.

Hey, that's really awesome. It's really nice to hear that you're making a difference! Good luck with the project!

> Maybe host a math contest forum for working adults where we can work on interesting integrals & suchlike :)

I'm sure you must know about https://artofproblemsolving.com/community They have a huge collection of problems, and sometimes solutions.

I'm somewhat curious about the logistics of the courses. How many students are in your classes? Do you run one-on-ones online? And are they really one-on-one, i.e. only one student at a time? Or is it more like office-hours?

Also how much time does it take you weekly to prepare the course materials and to check the homeworks?

thanks! yeah aops is the mother ship, i am just plying a little ferry. my problem sets come from irodov, loney, hall and knight. These are 100+ year old classics, can get them off libgen. during covid i did zoom. nowadays the students just drop in on weekends. i don’t really prepare, most of this is high school math and thankfully my math muscles haven’t atrophied. honestly, i like the midwest. yes people are poor and the public school system is grossly underfunded. but the kids want to learn and i feel i am making a difference teaching them competition math. there’s no money in it, that’s forsure. but it makes me happy.

I'll reach out to folks. Maybe a Mastodon instance?

Do you people have any more open social channels? I used to be active a bit on CrossValidated (my favorite math problems are in probability and stats), but something more social could be nice.

Do you guys have a listserv or IRC channel? Are you accepting new members? :D

Would really love to be a part of this group, any chance I could join in?

Would love to join this group as well, if possible.

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