Evan Chen is a very valuable person in the Math Olympiad scene.
The Geometry book [1] he wrote in high school is required reading for any serious competitor and I believe he is the main responsible for some bringing some techniques into the olympic meta, such as Barycentric Coordinates.
Also, his blog post [2] about writing is one of the best ones I've ever read.
Seems like a really interesting person. Off topic, but his assertions that the majority of students are “conned” into thinking math is important is strange to me. Almost everyone I know always knew they’d never need to know the Pythagorean theorem for the vast majority of life’s obstacles—they weren’t tricked into thinking it was important, they learned it because as a kid you don’t have any power and are coerced to complete certain tests to make your way along a certain circumscribed educational track.
The Pythagorean theorem is really useful for any construction. Builders use it regularly. More experienced DIYers also use it. Not a good example of rarely used schoolbook learning.
How about obscure stuff about hyperbolic trig functions (sinh, tanh and so on)?
I remember telling a friend once in high school, that I was kind of happy to find a good real-world use for cubic polynomials. She asked what it was, so I started "well I was programming..." and she interrupted, "of course math is useful for programming, that doesn't count".
Never heard the author, but having read his blog, I've concluded I am this guy modulo the talent and the fact that he got to my way of thinking in half the time.
There's a way to work around this using Android firefox (or a fork) with Android pdf.js extension. Mozilla is making this hard by not blessing this extension even though it uses one of their own developed pieces of software.
For some reason Android app devs think it's perfectly normal to not be able to open pdf's in a browser tab.
The Geometry book [1] he wrote in high school is required reading for any serious competitor and I believe he is the main responsible for some bringing some techniques into the olympic meta, such as Barycentric Coordinates.
Also, his blog post [2] about writing is one of the best ones I've ever read.
[1] https://web.evanchen.cc/geombook.html [2] https://blog.evanchen.cc/2015/03/14/writing/