A Book Review of Count Down: The Race for Beautiful Solutions at the IMO
I read a lot of popular science and math books. Scientific and mathematical exposition to the public is a fundamental task that must be done; but for some reason, it is simply not getting done well enough. One day, perhaps I’ll write expository (i.e. for non-math folk) math. But until then, I read everything I can. I then thought that if I read them all, I should share what I think.
Today, I consider the book Count Down: The Race for Beautiful Solutions at the International Mathematics Olympiad, by Steve Olson. 
The review itself can be found after the fold (more…)
Posted in Book Review, Mathematics
Tagged book, Book Review, Count Down, IMO, math, mathematics, Olson, olympiad
2 Comments
David Lowry-Duda October 19, 2021 at 7:14 pm on An Intuitive Overview of Taylor SeriesHi Bob! The behavior of $c$ is actually quite subtle. It's not true that $c$ is actually a constant. For "nice" functions, what is true is that the mean value $c$ varies continuously over intervals (except at finitely many points). Combined with a form of Darboux's theorem (stating that every function that is the derivative of another function has the ---
Bob October 18, 2021 at 6:09 pm on An Intuitive Overview of Taylor SeriesIt's been a while since there was a comment here, but I'll give it a try in the hope for a response. Your proof gives me a sense of validation in my own work, although I still have questions. I wrote a very similar idea here: https://math.stackexchange.com/q/4277898/225136 . As you can see from a comment that someone left, the proof ---
Yavor Kirov April 14, 2021 at 3:24 am on Long live opalstack!Thabk you! I was looking for an opinion of a long-term user of Opalstack so your answer was exactly what I needed. 
Tomek March 18, 2021 at 5:09 pm on A response to FtYoU’s question on RedditGod bless you David. Great explanation! 
Jan van Delden February 25, 2021 at 5:07 pm on phase_mag_plot: a sage package for plotting complex functionsI took the liberty to download your SageMath module and changed a few options. Since I was not completely clear on the interaction between lightness and color (defined by the argument of the function to be displayed) I decided to weigh these differently. Color, from the colorwheel by 0.8 and lightness by 0.2. I computed the color first and weighed ---
eliot December 23, 2020 at 4:07 pm on Trigonometric and related substitutions in integralsFor Euler substitutions, do you mind explaining the reasoning for the t term in x*sqrt(a) + t. Is there anywhere else I can read up on this? Thanks for this post!