Lame title.
1. IMO 2026
I was an observer B for the Singapore team. The team did really well, finishing 4th.
I liked the IMO paper — it was unmemorable in a good way.1
2. Triple Collab
During IMO training this year, we had 3 international collaborations, one with Indonesia, one with India, and one with Mongolia, Iran and Taiwan.
There are some actual benefits to collabs, but my main motivation to do them was for fun.
Story #1: The idea for India-Singapore originated in 2024 between me and their 2025 observer while we were talking about IMO 2024 results.
Story #2: With Indonesia we managed to go through the problems together online! My favourite picture this year is a Zoom screenshot with the Singapore and Indonesian team. (The picture wasn’t the best, but for it to exist many things had to go right.)
Story #3 (self-explanatory):
3. 2025 A6
Two of my proposals were submitted to ISL last year, of which one of them ended up as A6. I’ve known this for about a year already, and it was pretty irritating not being able to tell anybody about it until NTST.
The coolest thing about having a problem on the ISL (to me) is imagining how many people from all over the world would have tried it in their training camps, and how some of them enjoyed the process of solving it just as I enjoyed solving (some) ISL problems as a contestant.2
A lot of people have been asking for my motivation behind some problems. I have consolidated them here.
- People expect the IMO to be the best paper of the year, so the fact that nobody is complaining about anything at all means it was a success. ↩︎
- Semi-relatedly, if you really like a problem, try to let the proposer know! The easiest way to do this is to reply to the respective AoPS thread. Problem proposing is voluntary unpaid work, and small words of encouragement can really mean a lot in the occasionally toxic environment of contest math. ↩︎
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