Of course contest math is not research math but the active IMO kids are pretty much the best in the world at math contests.

Who is building the Math Academy equivalent for other subjects (especially other sciences)?

From listening to interviews, it seems like after completing a full undergrad's worth of math courses, they plan to expand to CS and math-adjacent fields (probably physics at least?).

Introducing: Balanced Fischer chess. Just randomly sample from the starting positions that are more balanced than regular chess.

It’s still annoying if the starting position is one that only one of the players is deeply familiar with. Too much luck factor. They should go the shogi route and get rid of draws if they want to improve chess so much.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. I don’t think this possible. Draws happen when two players are very closely matched that the difference in their play is not large enough to lead to a definite outcome. Currently in chess, 2800 like Magnus would draw say 70% of the time against a 2600 and win the rest (making up numbers here). The only way to solve this problem, is if the game magnifies differences in capability and enables a certain side to win. Making a game that does this, is probably very hard and would not look anything like chess.

Any other solution would face the same issue that chess faces now. For example let us say, we imbalance the sides a bit more so that white has a more definitive advantage. That just means that players will alternate winning and you’ll have to play a lot of games before anything definitive happens. In a technical sense there may not be draws, but if it just alternates 1-0, 0-1 and so on, is it better than 0.5-0.5 and so?

Shogi allows early momentum to snowball (since a captured piece is your piece). This means white has a much more definitive advantage in Shogi as white has the tempo, so I don’t think Shogi will fix anything, it will just cause see-saws. In fact I think fixing this chess issue, is far harder than it looks, and may require coordination to move all chess players to a new tactical game that magnifies differences in playing capability far more than chess which already magnifies it quite a bit.

Good points yeah, I wasn't imagining shogi to be a game with early momentum for white since I don't play it but it make sense.

Terence Tao has well over 50K citations. Maybe one can argue that he’s gaming the system because he alone can decide what problems are deemed to be interesting by the broader community, but he can’t help that.

In this case, it might matter that mathematics aren't strictly speaking, a science.

Care to share some life changing Tiktok videos?

It’s hard to remember here are a few off the top of my head:

Pete Holmes God is nothing. Supposed to be comedy but really clicked for me.

A couple series where people just strike up conversations with strangers. It started to feel normalized after a while and I started doing it in my own life.

Maybe not life changing but a pickleball tip on something I’d been struggling with that finally made it click. (Judging which balls are going out)

There are lots of other things but those jump out at me.

With hundreds of videos watched per month and 5% of them being life changing, your life would change an awful lot.

I wont quote the 5% number, but I have changed multiple ways of doing things in my (daily!) life from tiktok: how i tie my shoes and a bunch of other knots, how I prepare some of my daily food like eggs and potatoes has changed, how I interact with my phone (unknown shortcuts and features). I literally can't enumerate all the things I have learned and used. Two weeks ago, I had to pull a t-post out of the ground and I used a technique I saw a week or two earlier and it made it so damn easy.

Yes you can get a 7/7 score for a combinatorics problem in IMO with a good amount of handwaving e.g. instead of formally describing a configuration of monsters in P5 of IMO 2024 you can get away with a few sentences that describes what you're doing. There's actually a decent amount of compression being done by using informal language, so I expect formal proofs of combinatorics problems to be significantly longer than formal proofs of algebra/number theory/geometry problems.

I should say that handwaving is also ok in other topics, but formalizing handwaving in other topics is easier.

Yeah it made me realize that I actually don't want a human-like conversational bot (I have actual humans for that). Just teach me javascript like a robot.

Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I don’t want a talking computer.

I have enough talking people to deal with already .

I've worked in software and tech my whole life and there are few things I dislike more than talking to a computer.

I don't use siri. I don't use speech-to-text. I don't use voice-response menus if I can push a button. I don't have a microphone on my computer.

I don't know why this is. Most of the people I know think it's fun, or a novelty, or even useful. I just viscerally dislike it.