The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released the largest free library of Olympiad-level math problems ever assembled, a collection of more than 30,000 problems and expert-written solutions spanning 47 countries and territories.
The database, MathNet, aims at students training for elite math competitions who have historically had to prepare on their own.
It was built by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) together with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Saudi AI firm HUMAIN. It was unveiled on April 20 and is available free to the public on the CSAIL website.
Every year, countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad arrive with a booklet of their most original problems. The booklets are traded among delegations and then largely disappear. MathNet is the first systematic attempt to collect, digitize, and open them to the world.
The collection contains 30,676 problems from 143 competitions in 17 languages, spanning roughly four decades of elite mathematics. It is five times larger than the next-biggest dataset of its kind, MIT CSAIL said.
Vietnam’s 259 problems place it among the better-represented countries in the archive.
What distinguishes MathNet from existing online math forums is the quality of the solutions. Community sites typically offer short, unofficial answers, sometimes crowdsourced and unverified. Every MathNet solution was written by experts and peer-reviewed, often running to several pages and walking through multiple approaches to the same problem, MIT CSAIL said.
To validate the dataset, the researchers recruited more than 30 human evaluators from countries including Vietnam, Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to verify thousands of solutions.
Source: VN Express