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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The person I know who attended Cambridge for maths was a USAJMO qualifier in HS, and had a several top 10 and recognition awards in less-popular but still prestigious national-level pure and applied, individual and and team, exam and project, math contest 
 award, and a research internship in HS.

That's about top 100 to 200 in USA in-grade-level performing HS math student. [/quote]

It may be true that there are a good number of high performing math olympiad kids studying math at prestigious university math programs. However, competition math and the math you study in college are quite different. Competition math is not everyone's cup of tea and you don't need to have invested in becoming a math competition champ to be good at the kind of math one does in college or graduate school or as a career mathematician. [/quote]

"Competition math" (aka  advanced, more abstract, deeper math) is the closest thing to college/grad/mathematician work than anything else done in high school. [/quote]
No, much of competition math is fun tricks and skills particular to the competition format. Taking actual math courses is the closest to college math work.[/quote]
Please explain the "fun tricks" particular to USAMO: https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2024_USAMO_Problems

Being able to solve these types of proof-based problems is a much better predictor of your ability to succeed in pure maths than how well you can plug and chug in a college multi/diffeq/lin alg course. That's why trinity college in Cambridge, the most selective Cambridge college for maths, maintains such a close relationship with the UK's top competition math students but not the accelerated students who take university math classes through the Open University.[/quote]
Just because you post math you don't understand, doesn't mean there isn't a formulaic way of going about studying competition math. It's okay to be stupid, just don't be confident in that ignorance.[/quote]

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