Jyoti Prakash Saha

He remarked the following in the foreword to the text Infinity by Hojoo Lee, Tom Lovering (he maintains a blog), and Cosmin Pohoata.

The nations which do consistently well at this competition (IMO) must have at least one (and probably at least two) of the following attributes:

• A large population.
• A significant proportion of its population in receipt of a good education.
• A well-organized training infrastructure to support mathematics competitions.
• A culture which values intellectual achievement.

Alternatively, you need a cloning facility and a relaxed regulatory framework.

Here is an excerpt from his Advice for young mathematicians.

From time to time I am approached by students interested in advice about becoming more effective contestants in mathematics olympiads. Here it is.

Do lots and lots, and then more, past papers. Begin with national mathematical olympiads, starting with the less difficult papers. Now, I am not going to risk insulting any countries by saying that their national maths olympiads are easy. Work it out for yourself. Countries which have small populations, and no great tradition of success in maths competitions, will generally have easier questions. When you become very good at those, then move on to hard national maths olympiad problems and the less demanding international competitions.

I am often approached by students from developing countries. Sometimes students complain that there is no satisfactory educational or training regime in my country. Please check that this is true! The IMO contact person in your country may tell you otherwise. In the worst case, where there is no competent organization providing free (or nearly free) assistance to young mathematicians, then you will have to help yourself. Try to locate other young people in your country who are interested in mathematics, and work together. Fortunately there is a vast collection of free resources on the internet: over 25 thousand past problems from maths competitions are available at the extensive Art of Problem Solving site, and if you explore, you will find discussions of solutions. Don’t look up the solutions too quickly (be prepared to spend many hours thinking about each problem). If you want to start on some problems which are less demanding than a full national maths olympiad, here are plenty of British Maths Olympiad round 1 problems. The round 2 problems are more challenging.

• To provide a brief introduction to Mathematical Olympiad.
• To serve as a website for the MOPSS program at IISER Bhopal, to be held in person, from August 2024 to November 2024.
  • We have plans to post notes containing the details of those sessions.
• To provide handouts on the topics of Algebra, Combinatorics, Geometry, and Number Theory, and to keep it posted in an organized manner across different sub-topics.
  • These notes may be useful to the students who would like to have a look at some of the past RMO problems before getting started, or just curious about it.
  • These notes may also serve as a reference to anyone who would like to provide guidance to students, but may not have enough time to organize the relevant questions across the topics and sub-topics.
• To provide assistance to anyone on Mathematics Olympiad.

• One may reach to schools, to high schoolers.
• One may explain about Olympiads, and spread awareness about it.
• One may encourage people (for instance, students, teachers or anyone enthusiastic/curious about math olympiad) to go through this website (and suggest a careful reading of the homepage!).
• Next, a student interested in math olympiad, may browse through the handouts posted here (this will grow with time).
• A person with passion in teaching high school students could use the handouts as a problem bag, or in other way.
• What else? For instance, if one has interest in a science subject(s) other than (or parallel to) mathematics, then one may refer to the webpage of HBCSE, which has information about olympiads (past papers) on the following subjects, and may repeat the same process as above adapted to those subjects!
  • Astronomy
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Junior Science
  • Physics

• Yes! You could spread the message, only if you find it worth doing and willing to do so, by
  • sharing the link https://jpsaha.github.io/MOTP/,
  • and suggeting to go through the homepage https://jpsaha.github.io/MOTP/, to find what all this is about!