flâneur

A timeline of my relationship with olympiad geometry

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Someone sent a link to the book Euclidean Geometry in Math Olympiads in a giant Google Hangouts chat, so I clicked on it and started reading. I had never liked geometry before that, but something about the way the book was written got me hooked. It didn’t feel like I was presented with a bunch of facts, but rather that I was discovering them myself -- like I had been dropped in a vast unknown forest and was slowly exploring it. The entire book took me 6 whole months to read; I did almost every single problem. But those 6 months of COVID-19 lockdown were full of color. Every day I would be mindblown, and wake up eager to be mindblown again. I really wanted to become good at olympiad math in general during this period, so I learned geometry techniques like Spiral Similarity (to this day probably my #1 favorite technique) but also learned combinatorics, number theory, and algebra too. Geometry was always by far my favorite though; part of me wished that I could spend all day on it. Eventu

A timeline of my relationship with olympiad geometry I’m an artist pretending to be a mathematician Vivian Loh Apr 22, 2025 30 11 1 Share June-December 2020: First introduction to olympiad geometry Someone sent a link to the book Euclidean Geometry in Math Olympiads in a giant Google Hangouts chat, so I clicked on it and started reading. I had never liked geometry before that, but something about the way the book was written got me hooked. It didn’t feel like I was presented with a bunch of facts, but rather that I was discovering them myself -- like I had been dropped in a vast unknown forest

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