15th Annual Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament #0jag
15th Annual Harvard-MIT Mathematics TournamentHard
From module Geometry with Complex Numbers
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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.
Complex numbers in geometryInversionSums and products
Problem
Problem:
Alice is sitting in a teacup ride with infinitely many layers of spinning disks. The largest disk has radius . Each succeeding disk has its center attached to a point on the circumference of the previous disk and has a radius equal to of the previous disk. Each disk spins around its center (relative to the disk it is attached to) at a rate of radians per second. Initially, at , the centers of the disks are aligned on a single line, going outward. Alice is sitting at the limit point of all these disks. After seconds, what is the length of the trajectory that Alice has traced out?