Can you best a math Olympiad? Test your skills with the world’s largest database of problems.
In 1959, countries around the world sent their most talented students to Romania to compete in the first-ever International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO). Since then, the rules have remained simple, even if the problems are not: over two days, each team works to solve a total of six math problems. After almost 70 years, competitors from the United States, China and Luxembourg have achieved a perfect score over the years. But while each year’s competition focuses on just six problems, IMO has long had another side.
“Each country brings a playbook of its newest and most creative problems,” explained Shaden Alshammari, a mathematician at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “They share the booklets among themselves, but no one [has] makes the effort to collect them, clean them and put them online.
Alshammari and his colleagues finally changed that with MathNet, the world’s largest repository of proof-based math problems. With more than 30,000 questions and their solutions from 47 countries, MathNet is five times larger than the previous record holder. It is also a major advance in representation when it comes to mathematical perspectives and problem-solving approaches.
“I remember so many students for whom it was an individual effort. No one in their country was training them for this kind of competition,” Alshammari said. “We hope this will give them a centralized place with high-quality problems and solutions that they can learn from.” »
It took decades of work to reach this pivotal moment. Since 2006, IMO member and MathNet contributor Navid Safaei has been scouring global sources to collect archival booklets. Much of his individual work helped strengthen the data set, which now includes 1,595 PDF scans of physical documents totaling more than 25,000 pages.
MathNet is already freely available to the public through MIT CSAIL. You may not understand most, if not all, of the issues, but this resource may prove invaluable to the next prodigy.
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