Our New Toy

My father bought an iPad. It was shipped from US and we received it yesterday. I think it costs US$7xx (about S$1000). We downloaded many free games and utilities from the Internet (Apple iTunes Store).

Year 3 Semester 1 Results

My semestral GPA is 4.6 (max is 5). I did badly for Fine Art. I look forward to dropping this subject in 1.5 years' time. For Year 5 & 6, I would like to take Maths Major with Honours (already taking it now), Physics Major with Honours, Chemistry Major with Honours and Computer Science Major.

Singapore Team to 51st IMO

The results for the Singapore National Team for 51st International Mathematical Olympiad were released today. Out of the 6 participants selected, 2 are from RI-JC (Ivan Loh and Vincent Tseng), 1 from ACS(I) (Ang Jie Jun) and 3 from NUSH (Ang Yan Sheng, Gabriel Wong and I).

The 51st IMO will be held in Astana, the Republic of Kazakhstan. I do not know much about the country so I googled it - the Republic of Kazakhstan is in Eurasia and ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, and its location is below:


Training for the Singapore IMO national team will start next Thu (20/5) at NUS Maths Dept, and will stretch all the way to the competition itself, which is from 4 Jul to 15 Jul. Just like last year, my 1-month June holidays will be spent on training and I am going to miss many lessons again when school reopens ...

Art of Problem Solving

I think The Art of Problem Solving is the best resource for Maths problem solving. You can also train your quick thinking by playing Maths games with other people. Try FTW! to pit your Maths skills in solving AMC kind of questions against other Maths enthusiasts. At the end of a game, you will be rated against other registered players.

If you have any Maths problems, go to mathlinks.ro and post your problems there (instead of spamming my cbox :) ), and hopefully someone else will answer it for you. It has forums for primary school kind of Maths questions, to high school types, to Maths Olympiad questions, college/university Maths and even Arts and Sciences.
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php

SIMO NTST 2010

I took the Singapore IMO National Team Selection Test yesterday and today. It was like the IMO format i.e. 3 questions to be done in 4.5 hrs each day. The type of questions were: 1. Geometry, 2. Algebra, 3. Combinatorics, 4. Combinatorics, 5. Number Theory, 6. Inequalities. They were taken from the IMO 2009 Shortlist questions (in the IMO, there are Longlist questions and Shortlist questions, and the 6 questions for IMO are selected from the Shortlist questions). I am not supposed to reveal the questions as some other countries may also be using some of these Shortlist questions which were not selected for IMO questions, for their own national selection tests.

Too bad there was only 1 Geometry qn, usually in the IMO there are 2, one for each day. Anyway, I could only solve qn 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6. I think the ever pro Ivan could solve all 6 questions!

*note: this is in fact the 2nd selection test. The 1st selection test with a lower weightage was held about a month ago.