I know that it’s Tuesday, which might not look like part of the weekend. However, this weekend was a long weekend and I had Monday and Tuesday off, so I think this counts as being part of the weekend.

I was hoping to be able to finish my reference document that gives the necessary background to understand my paper, and then goes over the mathematical content in the paper. However, this is a far larger endeavor than I expected, and I’m 4 pages in and still have so much to say, but here’s a rough draft: https://www.overleaf.com/read/hxvvjwbmsvgw

I will probably lengthen this into a handout or short book. The name is still mutable, but I think it might call it “Practical Convex Optimisation.” There’s so much stuff to talk about, and I don’t think a short document would do it justice. Unfortunately, I also will not have time to do it next week.

For some reason, my todo list has a massive bulge in the 2/14-2/16 period. I guess the first half of next week is just a magnet to commitments. There’s some small stuff, like an election statement and prefect application, and some human stuff, like a school meeting announcement for a Wordle Tournament and Valentine’s Day. However, the most time consuming commitments are F=ma and AIME. By some unlucky coincidence, Choate is doing both F=ma B and AIME 2, so they’re both in the same week and are on back to back days. I guess it’s somewhat expected because if we randomly choose F=ma and AIME test dates, there’s a 1/2 probability that we do either {F=ma A, AIME 1} or {F=ma B, AIME 2}. However, I feel like most people are doing {F=ma B, AIME 1}, which seems intentional because it’s much chiller.

AIME is terrifying because it’s the first of two make-or-break contests, the second being USAMO 2022, for entering the TST process for IMO 2023. At some point, I should write something similar to https://blog.evanchen.cc/2020/11/10/usa-special-team-selection-test-series-for-imo-2021/

which can explain the entire MAA math contest process. The IMO Team Selection Process is really complicated and weird, and I don’t think that many non-moppers know how it works. Regardless, AIME is pretty important even without the TST process. I need a 11 out of 15 to be safe (which would give a 240.5 USAMO index should be fine). This should be fine since I got a 14 last year, but I also haven’t done nearly as much computational as I did last year so I might end up hard throwing AIME.

As for F=ma, I probably won’t prep too much, maybe one or two practice sets. I qualified last year by the slimmest of margins, getting exactly the cutoff score only after they accepted a second answer for a broken problem. I don’t have high hopes for F=ma, but I’ll probably try to make time because a second USAPhO qualification would be pretty cool. Still, I care MUCH more about qualifying for USAMO because I can actually do well on USAMO, not so much for USAPhO.

I’m going to try to be more punctual about next week’s blog post, I think it’ll be on treating school like a day job (which \neq slacking). This blog post was mostly just a thought dump, so I’ll also mention that I’m going to add the date to the titles of all of my blog posts, and add in these nice “previous” and “next” buttons that let you move through posts.