Preview: fun special events at this weekend's practice

Hi everyone,

We'll have our next practices this weekend, 5pm-7pm Pacific time on both Saturday and Sunday. See the practice website for details: https://math.berkeley.edu/~moorxu/2020ARML/. 

Thanks to everyone who came to practice last weekend. At last weekend's practice, we expanded our breakout sessions to include a "beginner's room" for those of you who are new to ARML and looking for a more guided experience. We also went beyond ARML, with rooms featuring a countdown round from mathleague.org and a guts round from the ASDAN Math Tournament. At future practices, we hope to continue to have a diversity of breakout rooms for participants of different experience levels and different interests.

As a preview for what's coming this weekend, we plan to have another "beginner's room" and to continue to have some content from ARML. In addition, we're planning to hold a couple of new one-time events this week:

• Introduction to Competitive Programming with Nick Wu. (Click link for details.) Nick is sometimes known as the fastest programmer in the world, and he coaches competitive programming in addition to math. This is your chance to learn what programming contests are all about!
• Nick is open to presenting competitive programming content catered to active competitors in future weeks. If you're interested, please fill out this survey.
• Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo will present Cayley's Theorem for counting labeled trees. (See below for abstract). In addition to being known for his favorite factoring trick, Simon is also the instructor at Euler Circle, and this is your chance to check out his teaching style. Many past ARML participants are also Euler Circle students or alumni, and I highly recommend Euler Circle to advanced motivated students -- especially those looking for math camps this summer. More on Euler Circle at the end of this email.
• How many ways are there to make a tree out of n vertices labeled 1 through n? This is the content of Cayley's Theorem, a beautiful theorem in combinatorics with an unreasonably nice answer. We'll state and prove Cayley's Theorem and see a few of the things we can do with it.

I'm excited that we're expanding the focus of this year's practices beyond math competitions and ARML. Going forward, I hope for our online practices to serve as a meeting place for our community to connect over a board range of fun topics. With that in mind, I'd like to invite all of you (especially current students) to host a session in a future week. If you have a topic in mind, or if you don't and are looking for suggestions, please get in touch with me -- I'd love to work with you!

A few quick logistical notes:

• Materials for past practice are now on the practice website. To view those files, please use username=sfba and password=arml.
• As usual, the Zoom link for practice will be sent to this email list approximately 10 minutes before each practice begins. Please log on with your real name, and try to be on time.
• If you aren't on this mailing list (for example, if someone forwarded this email to you, or if you're seeing this on the email blog), you won't receive meeting links. Go to http://mathleague.org/armlapp.php to sign up for the email list.
• See our email archive for a record of any past emails you may have missed. Zoom links won't be posted there though. http://sfbaarml.blogspot.com/.
• As always, we will have a variety of breakout sessions during each practice. The special events listed above will occur on both Saturday and Sunday. If you come on both days, you can experience twice the number of activities!

One final request: If you know of anyone else who might be interested in joining us at our practices (for example, if they want to see one of our special events this weekend), please invite them to join us! We're always happy to have more friends join us at these sessions. Hope to see you this weekend!

Best,

Moor

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P.S. Here's a note from Simon about Euler Circle -- looks like fun! Please let me know if you have your own mathematical opportunities that you'd like to share with everyone. :)

Euler Circle is a mathematics institute run by ARML coach Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo, dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes to high-school students. (You can see a preview by coming to the session on Cayley's Theorem this weekend.) Through these classes, students get an opportunity to see what mathematics looks like beyond the competition curriculum. While classes are usually held in-person, they are temporarily online while it remains unsafe to meet in person, which means that anyone is welcome to apply. Over the summer, we will be running two classes, which serve as substitutes for the math camps that either aren't happening or are going online this year. In the first session from June 8 through July 10, we will have a class on ring theory and algebraic geometry, and in the second session from July 13 through August 14, we will have a class on proofs from the book, focusing on some of the most beautiful proofs in all of mathematics. Classes meet Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 9:30--11:30 AM Pacific time. These are very ambitious classes, so you should have a solid background in writing proofs at the very least. Some knowledge of abstract algebra is a plus for the ring theory and algebraic geometry class, but very ambitious students who have not seen abstract algebra yet should also be able to follow.

Applications for the ring theory and algebraic geometry class are due May 10th, and applications for the proofs from the book class are due June 14th. Click here to apply.