On 4/7/2024, I attended the Rutgers Exposition in Problem Solving with some members of my math team. I was motivated by two events to attend. The Po-Shen Loh talk and the Mini Math Competition. Next, I will break down my hour-by-hour experience at OMMC's REPS.
The keynote speech by Evan Chang was pretty good, but it was not anything crazy. Next, Professor Po-Shen Loh (who is also the US IMO Coach) gave a talk about logical thinking and why AI lacks this critical function. I understood his talk pretty well, and I thought it was fairly amazing. He spoke about how AI is getting better and better at solving math problems and related his speech to Wall Street Journal and New York Times reports. We also went through the importance of logic, which I thought was great. I also thought about the part about his program, LIVE, and his part in educating mathematicians with 'people skills' to help them make college.
Next, we had the estimathon. I did pretty well, actually, even getting the number of street signs in New York, along with other things like how much MetLife Stadium cost, but in the end, you needed close to a perfect score to win, and I missed on a few questions (this didn't even require too much math knowledge; it was pretty much just guessing in my opinion). Next, Rutgers professor Ying Hung gave a speech about statistics that made me think pretty hard (well, not exactly, but go with it). I thought about her statistics questions for a while and ended up solving them with a truly randomized sequence and a logical formula. However, next was the Mini Math Competition, which I really wanted to win (~300 people competed but like I'm ambitious), so I worked on the 3 problems and solved them all (3/3 correct) in ~20 seconds, but by this time around 5 people had already submitted, and I was around the 7th submission, which made it so that I just missed out on winning because only the top 3 get prizes (my teammates submitted like 100th+ submission so they had absolutely no chance of winning).
Next, we had a lecture about competitive coding, which I plan to participate in, and some pizza that did not satisfy my hunger. We ended with a small fireside chat about math, where MOP qualifiers and IMO participants told us about how they started in math, but I forgot to ask how they studied for math competitions (oops).
In the end, they gave out merchandise, and a big thanks to Evan Chang and Alex Wang for hosting this!