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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.

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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.

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