Against the “Research vs. Olympiads” Mantra – Power Overwhelming

There’s a Mantra that you often hear in math contest discussions: “math olympiads are very different from math research”. (For known instances, see O’Neil, Tao, and more. Mo…

Against the "Research vs. Olympiads" Mantra There’s a Mantra that you often hear in math contest discussions: “math olympiads are very different from math research”. (For known instances, see O’Neil , Tao , and others . More neutral stances: Monks , Xu .) It’s true. And I wish people would stop saying it. Every time I’ve heard the Mantra, it set off a little red siren in my head: something felt wrong. And I could never figure out quite why until last July. There was some (silly) forum discussion about how Allen Liu had done extraordinarily on math contests over the past year. Then someone says

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