Comment by gametorch

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

You've broken this guideline repeatedly in this thread. Can you please not do that on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are entire fields of math with exceptional people trying to solve impossibly hard problems that utilize quite literally 0 calculus.

Many of them are also questions that eventually end up with proofs or solutions that only require very high level understanding of basic principles. But when I say very high I mean like impossibly high for the average person and ability to combine simple concepts to solve complex problems.

I'd wager the majority of Math graduates from universities would struggle to answer most IMO questions.

Okay, let's see you try any one of the past IMOs and show us your score.

It's really hard.

See my other comment. I was voted the best at math in my entire high school by my teachers, completed the first two years of college classes while still in high school. I've tried IMO problems for fun. I'm very happy if I get one right. I'd be infinitely satisfied to score a perfect on 3 out of 6 problems and that's nowhere near gold.

Olympiad questions don't require advanced concepts except maybe some classical geometry techniques that you wouldn't normally encounter in modern research mathematics. But they're fundamentally designed as puzzles. You need to spot the tricks.

It's like saying getting a gold medal in boxing is not hard, because it doesn't involve any firearms

https://www.imo-official.org/year_info.aspx?year=2025

Take a look.

You'd be surprised at how much math the people who actually get IMO gold know...