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15th Annual Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament #0j9v

15th Annual Harvard-MIT Mathematics TournamentHard

From module Newton's Sums

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Understand the scale
Scale 0.5: Easiest math competition problems, often solvable even for early middle school students without experience. 1: Problems strictly for beginners, often at a moderate middle school level. 1.5: Problems for stronger beginner students, on the level of the middling problems in most middle school contests. 2: For motivated beginners, harder questions from the previous categories. 2.5: More advanced beginner problems, hardest questions from previous categories. 3: Early intermediate problems that require more creative thinking. 3.5: Tougher early intermediate problems that consistently stretch into higher-level creative thinking or conceptual knowledge. 4: Intermediate-level problems. 4.5: Upper intermediate problems approaching the upper bound for non-invitational sprint math competitions. 5: More difficult AIME problems or simple proof-based Olympiad-style problems. 6: High-level AIME-styled questions or introductory Olympiad-level questions. 7: Tougher Olympiad-level questions, may require more technical knowledge. 8: High-level Olympiad-level questions. 9: Expert Olympiad-level questions. 9.5: The hardest problems appearing on Olympiads which the strongest students could reasonably solve. 10: Historically notorious problems, generally unsuitable for even very hard competitions because they are exceedingly tedious, long, and difficult.
Polynomial interpolation: Newton, LagrangeQuadratic functions

Problem

Problem: Given that PP is a real polynomial of degree at most 20122012 such that P(n)=2nP(n) = 2^{n} for n=1,2,…,2012n = 1, 2, \ldots, 2012, what choice(s) of P(0)P(0) produce the minimal possible value of P(0)2+P(2013)2P(0)^{2} + P(2013)^{2}?

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