Pre-RMO

To be constructed

RMO

To be constructed

INMO

Topics and Syllabus

As per HBCSE, “The areas covered are arithmetic of integers, geometry, quadratic equations and expressions, trigonometry, co-ordinate geometry, system of linear equations, permutations and combination, factorization of polynomial, inequalities, elementary combinatorics, probability theory and number theory, finite series and complex numbers and elementary graph theory. The syllabus does not include calculus and statistics. The major areas from which problems are given are algebra, combinatorics, geometry and number theory.”

The last line pretty much sums up what the main topics are.

Preparation Strategies

• INMO is actually my favorite INO, because I feel it is more difficult than its counterparts, and it seems to diverge the most from JEE (Diverting from JEE is a great relief for me, as I was bored by doing the same stuff for more than 2 years).
• Same as other exams, I started studying for INMO a month before the exam and got fully-focused towards it a fortnight before.
• I also attended the INMOTC, held in DPS, Faridabad and that was a major push in training me towards olympiad maths. I think each state has its own INMOTC for all students who qualified RMO, and I would recommend everyone who has just gotten introduced to olympiad maths to attend it at least once. The teachers are usually the ones who teach at IMOTC and there are enough assignments to solve too.
• A personal tip, DON’T be scared of BASHING. Bashing is extremely helpful for people, like me, who don’t have highly developed mathematical intuition and can’t get approaches to questions quickly. You have to just do hard work and hard work and write fast, Question solved. I actually solved the 2 questions of INMO 2019 by bashing.
• On another note, my teacher prepared 12 assignments with 8 questions each which were mostly IMO shortlist questions of easier level. If you have time, I highly recommend solving IMO shortlist problems. I, personally, did previous papers of INMO, and solved some mock papers prepared by Aakash.
• On the day before the exam, I actually just went through the solutions of the selected IMO shortlist questions, because I didn’t have much time to think about each of them and going through them actually helped me realize the different standard ways to think about each question. More importantly, an exact question came in my paper from one of the assignments.

Proof: This is the IMO (longlist) problem go to page 117, P31, This is INMO 2019 Question paper , see Q6

In the end, I scored 70/102 marks, and am extremely happy with it

By INMO 2020, I had experience about what to expect, and just went through the solutions of the selected IMO shortlist questions, just like previous year. I scored, unexpectedly, 75/102.

Resources and Online material

• Previous year papers of INMO from HBCSE website (I couldn’t find INMO 2019 question paper soft copy; even Internet Archive is of no use)

• AoPS is a great community of olympiad maths. Personally, I wasn’t active on it and don’t know much about its resources\footnote{if you know about various resources available here, contact me below and I would fill this section with it}

• Evan Chen’s website is a great website recommended by my IMOTC friends

• Here are shortlists of previous years from the official website and these are some older ones from AoPS

• This is a compiled version of IMO longlist of previous years from 1959-2004

Q6 story

The day before, when I was going through the assignments and solutions, as all the papers were arranged in a haphazard fashion, I missed the assignment 11 whose last question is the hero. During the paper, I had no idea that I had seen the question before, so I solved as usual, trying the ones I knew I could solve (even with bashing). After successfully solving 4 questions, I tried Q6 and wrote some stuff for it but achieved nothing in the end. Soon after the exam, my classmates told me that we had seen Q6 before, but they spent most of their time over it and still couldn’t solve it somehow. On the other hand, I was shocked/despondent that how I could miss it even after devoting the whole day towards just doing that. This took away my happiness of solving 4 questions. However, on careful comparison, we saw that one condition was missing as it is and had no idea if it could be solved without it. After some days, the HBCSE site released the news that the question was missing that condition and could not be solved without it. So, I missed the only assignment having that exact question in the next day’s paper, but that question was mistyped and became unsolvable, and I was not tempted towards it, still I got more than ½ of the marks for it. That is luck at an insane level.

Coming soon…

Resources, tips and advice from IMO medallists