Search results

Yeah... I topped 4U in 2002. I also did a bit of olympiad stuff...

personally, from using them a little + more using them in tutoring: for ext1, fitzpatrick is good for basic stuff but I find that it doesn't have enough questions to get you used to stuff. Patel: Good overall. Cambridge is my preferred text here, because it has lots and lots and lots of...

Did I say, like before... after a certain amount of talent which allows you to get all the questions, it comes down to being CAREFUL... and as with all things with being careful, it's luck.... so please stop saying "I'm so good, I'll definitely make top 10"... because I'm pretty sure that...

chord of contact usually pops up either as a derivation or you can assume it... I'd memorise it but definitely after the ones you're sure to use eg tangent.. although it's sort of a special case because it's really hard to derive off the top of your head... so I'd say have a vague idea of...

For me personally, it was handy to remember the ones which are used so commonly it's not worth deriving, then derive the rest. Because I like deriving stuff, I think that meant I just remembered the tangent formula and derived everything else... but it depends on the person. If you are the...

hey shafqat, I think you're probably right... usually you can't assume it. But I guess in the particular case of n=3 it's quite hard (I think most ppl, myself included, wouldn't work it out), so it's assumable... esp as you need to see that a^2 etc are the terms you sub in... Here's a more...

Apply AM-GM to the three terms on the left.

aural, I'd just second all the people here... saying you're good makes people respect you less... unless you have something to prove it with, that is... so feel free to say all you like, I'm sure people might (or might not) take it the right way..

I use mathematica at home because I have a legal copy of it... at uni, they only have maple. But that aside, I think mathematica is more useful for most of the stuff I do.. except for my last assignment! I had no idea on how to get an add-on (for smith normal form) to work... which meant I had...

without loss of generality... basically a nice way to save on case bash. If you know that out of A,B,C,D,E that one of them say is equal to zero, and they are basically symmetric in the question, you can say WLOG A=0 (ie you don't have to then write the case B=0, C=0... which are the same anyway)

If XY=0, det(X)det(Y)=0. Hence WLOG det(X)=0 so X is not invertible..

The "simple algebra" that shows that a/a = 1 is actually not that simple... it relies on the fact that R (the real numbers) is a group under multiplication ie that every member has an inverse. Because what you mean when you say a/a is actually a*a^(-1)... now R is actually not a group with...

I guess that way of it makes sense too :-)

-0 is 0... (btw, 0/0 is undefined) proof: 0 is the additive identity ie 0 + x = x + 0 = x. But the definition of minus in the real numbers is that (-x)+x=0 So -0=(-0)+0=0

Don't worry, I just emailed them :-P Hugh got the award in 2002 which is right, because if you read the webpage it's for topping the state in the year BEFORE the award...

I think TSP selection possibly uses other stuff... well quite a few of the TSP ppl I know anyway...

SGS never accelerates ppl, even if they want to... well very special cases anyway... I know of one, and that was for music.

it's a good joke... the version I heard a few years ago didn't have Australian in it, I think it might have just been 2 non-descript mathematicians..

Yeah... he's right :-)

it doesn't work - he's made at least 2 mistakes... (it would be -r-aq for instance) you know the complicated thing you got by multiplying the results of the first two parts? Let the answer to c be z, and the answer to a), b) be x, y respectively. Then...