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parsimo2010

I am a professor in a math department (I teach statistics but there is a good complement of actual math PhDs) and there are only about 10% who care about these types of problems and definitely less than half who could get gold on an IMO test even if they didn’t care.

They are all outstanding mathematicians, but the IMO type questions are not something that mathematicians can universally solve without preparation.

There are of course some places that pride themselves on only taking “high scoring” mathematicians, and people will introduce themselves with their name and what they scored on the Putnam exam. I don’t like being around those places or people.

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100% agree with this.

My second degree is in mathematics. Not only can I probably not do these but they likely aren’t useful to my work so I don’t actually care.

I’m not sure an LLM could replace the mathematical side of my work (modelling). Mostly because it’s applied and people don’t know what they are asking for, what is possible or how to do it and all the problems turn out to be quite simple really.

100% agree about this too (also a professional mathematician). To mathematicians who have not been trained on such problems, these will typically look very hard, especially the more recent olympiad problems (as opposed to problems from eg 30 years ago). Basically these problems have become more about mastering a very impressive list of techniques than at the inception (and participants prepare more and more for these). On the other hand, research mathematics has become more and more technical, but the techniques are very different, so that the correlation between olympiads and research is probably smaller than it once was.

> They are all outstanding mathematicians, but the IMO type questions are not something that mathematicians can universally solve without preparation.

So IMO is basically the leetcode of Mathematics.

Yeah, no - quite a chunk of IMO problems are planar and 3d geometry, and you don't really do that at university level (exception: specializing in high school maths didactics)

So IMO questions are to math what Leetcode is to programming?

I see this distinction a lot, but what is the fundamental difference between competition "math" and professional/research math? If people actually knew then they (young students, and their parents) could decide for themselves if they wanted to engage in either kind of study.

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