Tryouts and practices this weekend; t-shirts and song contest

Hi everyone, 

We will have practices again this week at the usual times: 5pm-7pm Pacific time on both Saturday and Sunday. See the practice website for details. As usual, we will send out the Zoom link for practice in this mailing list.

This week's practices: 

This week, in addition to the usual ARML tests and a Guts round (which we're scaling up to a "Guts Party" this weekend!),  Nick Wu will do a session on Advanced Topics in Competitive Programming. Please click the link for details (and there's a survey there for you to tell Nick what you want to see). As in past weeks, both Saturday and Sunday will offer the same breakout room choices; if you attend both days, you should select different breakout rooms the second time. 

Tryouts this weekend:

We plan to participate in the FARML competition on May 16 and the ARML Local competition on May 30. As I mentioned in my previous email, we will field as many teams as necessary to allow everyone to participate. The coaching staff will select a few "elite" teams to compete against other top teams from around the country. If you'd like to be considered for one of the elite teams, we are holding tryouts this weekend and next weekend. 

This year, we are asking that students opt-in for consideration for elite teams. By default, you would not be considered for elite team selection regardless of your score. If you would like to be considered for an elite team, please fill out our opt-in form (click the link). Note: we know that many of you have already filled out some of this information when you signed up for the email list, but you need to complete this form to be considered for team selection.

If you want to try out for our elite teams, you should also attend tryouts. We will have tryouts both this weekend and next weekend, adjacent to the practices:

• Saturday, April 25, 4-5pm Pacific (the hour before our Saturday practice -- we will start promptly at 4pm; I will send out the Zoom link by 3:50pm, and please be online and ready to do math by 3:55pm if possible.)
• Sunday, April 26, 7-8pm Pacific (the hour after our Sunday practice)
• Saturday, May 2, 7pm-8pm Pacific time
• Sunday, May 3, 4pm-5pm Pacific time
  

Every practice will feature different content, so we will have four distinct tryout opportunities. You are encouraged to attend as many as possible. And you're also encouraged to attend regardless of whether you're formally trying out for an elite team -- feel free to come by even if you just want to do an extra hour of math before or after practice. 

Note: If you're from a location outside of the Bay Area, Northern California, or what we've traditionally called "Wild Wild West" (AZ, ID, MT, NE, parts of NV, NM, ND, SD, WY), you're welcome to come to tryouts. If your home region has a FARML or ARML Local team, you should compete with them for the official competition; if your home region does not have a FARML or ARML Local team, you're welcome to join one of our teams.

T-Shirts: 

One of the great traditions of ARML is for teams to design matching t-shirts to wear on the day of the competition. Even though we aren't traveling to a national competition this year, we will intend to have shirts. We invite you to submit a design for this year's team t-shirt! After designs are submitted, the full team will vote on their favorite.

Designs should consist of a front design and a back design. To keep screen-printing costs low, you can use either (a) three colors on one side and one color on the other, or (b) two colors on each side.

When submitting your design, send an email to arml@mathleague.org with exactly four files:
A .png file (.jpeg is okay in a pinch) of the front design, preferably superimposed on a t-shirt shape to show how it's positioned
A .png file of the back design (like the above)
A vector-graphics file (such as .tif) of the front design
A vector-graphics file of the back design
The .png files will be used on the ballot for voting on designs, while the vector-graphics files will be sent to the printer if your design is chosen.

This year, we have a combined year covering "SFBA/NorCal" or "Bay Area/Northern California" and "Wild Wild West" in addition to friends from elsewhere. If you choose to identify the team in your design, you can use those or similar terms. You might also want to include "ARML", "2020", or other such things. None of these are mandatory. Please do not include anything offensive in the design; coaching staff reserve the right to censor or edit as necessary.

The deadline to submit designs is end of day on May 4th.

Song Contest:

Another ARML tradition from the East Coast is the Song Contest, where teams write math or ARML-themed songs (often parodies of popular songs) and perform them at the competition. We're importing this tradition this year, and we plan to hold our Song Contest some time in May. If you'd like to participate, this is a great time to start brainstorming. We accept both individual and group entries for the Song Contest.

The deadline to enter into the Song Contest is end of day on May 11th. We will likely ask you to submit a YouTube video, and we will invite finalists to perform at a later practice. Further details will come soon.

Logistics and housekeeping:

• 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.
• 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/.
• 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.
  
• Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested in joining us at our practices. They'll need to sign up for our email list to receive Zoom links.

Hope to see many of you this weekend, and stay safe!

Best,

Moor

Feedback survey; tryouts next week

Hi everyone, 

Great to see everyone at practice this past weekend. Thanks to Simon and Nick for hosting their special sessions, and thanks to all of the coaches for helping out at this weekend's sessions. We hope to bring more breakout rooms next weekend, featuring both ARML and non-ARML content. If you'd like to run a session in a future week, please get in touch with me! We will continue to have practice 5pm-7pm Pacific on both Saturday and Sunday next weekend (and each subsequent week until Memorial Day).

Practice materials are now available at https://math.berkeley.edu/~moorxu/2020ARML/. To access the materials, use username=sfba and password=arml. 

Please help us make these sessions better by filling out this feedback survey! The survey is anonymous and all questions are optional. All feedback is valuable. If you're in a hurry, the feedback can be filled out in 15 seconds; if you want to take the time to write more, we'll read every word.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMcgpG3WH1f5sgrEHTZ5rlYwlCw6KP8Hys44bKABxAtoD4GA/viewform

Later this spring, we plan to participate in the FARML and ARML Local contests (also on Zoom). We will organize as many teams as needed to give everyone the opportunity to participate. The coaching staff will select a few teams to compete against other top teams from around the country; everyone else will also compete on either regional or self-organized teams.

If you'd like to be considered for one of the selected "elite" teams, we are holding tryouts (on Zoom) next weekend, during the hour either before or after our usual practice. The schedule is as follows:

• Saturday, April 25, 4-5pm Pacific
• Sunday, April 26, 7-8pm Pacific

The two tryouts will feature different problems. and you are encouraged to attend as many as possible. We will also hold additional tryouts in the future, probably the following weekend. Team selection will include a number of factors (including tryout results and performance at other contests). Also, you are encouraged to attend tryouts regardless of whether you think you're qualified to be on an elite team. They'll provide extra math practice for you; you can think of them as an extension of the usual 2-hour ARML practices.

Note: we have not yet received guidance on how ARML's region rules will apply for this year. If you're from a location outside of the Bay Area, Northern California, or what we've traditionally called "Wild Wild West" (AZ, ID, MT, NE, parts of NV, NM, ND, SD, WY), you're welcome to come to tryouts, and we'll inform you at a later date whether you can join our teams for these contests or if you should join a team from your local region.

One final thing: I know we promised information on t-shirts and the song contest -- we're still working out the details, so more to come later. :)

Best,

Moor

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

--------------------------------------------------------------

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.

Today's practice

Zoom link has been sent out, please get in touch with us if you didn't receive it.

Practice updates

Hi everyone,

Thanks everyone for coming to our first online practices last weekend. On Saturday alone, we had more participants than at any past practice, ever. 

Our second weekend of practices will be this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 5pm-7pm Pacific time on each day. As we did last week, we will have the same content both days, with multiple parallel breakout sessions. If you choose to attend both days, you can attend different breakout sessions each day.

I think of last weekend's practices as a prototype for our online ARML practices. We've shown that we can reproduce the content of our in-person ARML practices, online. I'd like to go beyond that. Since we won't have the full ARML competition at the end of May, we don't have to follow the same recipe as we do in other years. I see this year's ARML practices as an opportunity for us to grow beyond just an ARML team, and to find other ways to do math as a community.

I posed this questions to the coaches, and I'd like to pose it to all of you as well: what would you like to see at practice? We've discussed teaching some new topics, problems from other contests in other formats, mathematical games, and others, in addition to our usual set of ARML content. If you're an advanced student who wants to lead an activity at practice, and share your experience with other students, please get in touch with me! I'd love to see some student-led activities as well.

A few housekeeping updates: 

• The materials that we used at last week's practice have been posted at the practice website: https://math.berkeley.edu/~moorxu/2020ARML/. To access this material, use username=sfba and password=arml. 
• An archive of past team announcements can be found at our email blog: http://sfbaarml.blogspot.com/.
• Going forward, Zoom links for practice will be sent to this email list approximately 10 minutes before the start of each practice -- at 4:50pm Pacific time on each Saturday and Sunday. Zoom links will no longer appear on the email blog.
• If you aren't on our email list (e.g. if someone forwarded this to you, or if you're seeing this on the email blog): please sign up for the email list at http://mathleague.org/armlapp.php.

If you know of anyone else who might want to join us this weekend, please pass this message along -- we'd love to have them. Hope to see you this weekend, and stay safe!

Best,

Moor

[2020 ARML] - Zoom link for today's practice (Sunday 4/5)

Hi everyone, 

Thanks to everyone who came to practice yesterday. We're planning for today's practice to feature the same five breakout rooms as yesterday's practice, so if you were at yesterday's practice, you're welcome to come back and join different breakout rooms this time.

I've gotten feedback that some people are having trouble getting my emails. Our email blog will always have an up-to-date record of the latest news though, so check there if you've missed anything.

http://sfbaarml.blogspot.com/

The Zoom info for today's practice is:

Tim Sanders is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: ARML practice 4/5/20
Time: Apr 5, 2020 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/695502112?pwd=ZGxMbFJlYWphZG16TmZGd0Mvd05CUT09

Meeting ID: 695 502 112
Password: 321446

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+13462487799,,695502112# US (Houston)

Dial by your location
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Meeting ID: 695 502 112
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aozZqNro

Best,

Moor

[2020 ARML] - Zoom link for practice today

Hi everyone,

Our first practice will start at 5pm today! The Zoom link is below. 

https://zoom.us/j/354184834?pwd=dWdRUXYzWXNEL205a3htQWFKQUpyUT09

Please use your real name on Zoom if possible, and see you soon.

By the way, if you've just joined the mailing list, please see http://sfbaarml.blogspot.com/ for past announcements.

Best,

Moor

[2020 ARML] - First ARML Practices this weekend!

Hi everyone,

Welcome to another year of ARML! As you know, this year ARML has been replaced by an online ARML Local contest. In these unusual circumstances and uncertain times, I believe it's more important than ever before that we provide the opportunity to get together every weekend, do math, and socialize with friends.

We plan to have weekly ARML practices on Zoom this spring, every Saturday and Sunday, 5pm-7pm, starting this weekend (today!). We will most likely have a mix of past ARML problems, math talks about miscellaneous topics, and whatever else people recommend. We plan for the Saturday and Sunday practices each weekend to feature similar content, and students are encouraged to come to one of the sessions each weekend. There will be multiple parallel mini-sessions at each practice, and if you choose to attend both sessions, there may be some overlapping material, but you will be able to participate in different breakout sessions the second time. We're still setting everything up for today's practice, and we will follow up with a Zoom invite this afternoon.

A few logistical announcements:

• If you ever miss any announcements, you can view our email archive.
• Join the SFBA ARML facebook page!
  
• Information about practices will be available at https://math.berkeley.edu/~moorxu/2020ARML/ soon.
• Please ignore any information on the team website about payments, travel, permission slips, etc -- no need for any of that this year.

I hope to see many of you at our first online practices this weekend. Over the years, I've come to associate spring with ARML, and I'm excited to get back to the rhythm of regular weekend practices. Even though our practices will have an unusual format, it will be full of friendly familiar faces, and it will feel like spring again.

Best,

Moor

[2019 ARML] - update regarding ARML this year

Hi Everyone,

As many of you have already heard, ARML as we know it is not happening this year. However, it is being replaced with the ARML Local contest that usually occurs in April, and this contest will not require any travel. Other than dealing with the ponderous logistics of collecting fees and permission slips and getting 150 people to Las Vegas, we plan to keep things as close to normal this year as possible. This includes holding practices and organizing teams for the contest that ARML is running. We would like to invite all interested students in grades 6 through 12 to join our community this year; please fill out the information sheet at http://mathleague.org/armlapp.php so we can get you on our mailing list for announcements and practice meeting links.

We will be meeting for practice over Zoom every Saturday and Sunday from 5pm to 7pm Pacific beginning this weekend and continuing until further notice. For now students will be given an opportunity at practice to choose among various breakout rooms to attend. We will cover the same material in both practices each weekend, so students can choose which time suits them best. However, students who are interested in attending both Saturday and Sunday may join different breakout rooms each session for double the mathematical fun! As the season progresses, we will begin to assign students to teams for ARML Local as well as any other scrimmages we can arrange; at this point we may change the practice details so as to get full teams practicing specific material at the same time.

Please note that this is the only email you should expect about ARML from our existing mailing lists; if you wish to receive further notifications, be sure to sign up at http://mathleague.org/armlapp.php so we can get you on our ARML 2020 mailing list. We are looking forward to another successful ARML season and hope you can join us!

-Tim and all the other SFBA and WWW ARML coaches