Joining the HMMT Staff

If you're an MIT or Harvard student interested in helping either organize the tournament beforehand or run it on contest day, please contact hmmt-request@mit.edu. You can also join the following mailing lists:

  • hmmt-list, a low-traffic announcement list. This list recruits help for the day of the contest. We need people to grade and proctor exams.
  • hmmt-discuss, a list for discussion about HMMT. This mailing list gets mail about the organization of HMMT.

Submitting Problems

We need more than 100 problems in Algebra, Calculus, Combinatorics, and Geometry, both short-answer and proof-style. There's plenty of room for you to exercise your creativity. There's also no need to rack your brain to make the most impenetrable questions possible. We need more easy problems than hard problems, so deep meditation is optional. In fact, we college students generally underestimate difficulty, so you are particularly encouraged to send in problems you find borderline trivial—what's easy for you may in fact be the right level. Here are some more specific guidelines:

  • Don't worry about fitting a problem onto a specific test. If you send in a good problem, we'll try to accomodate it.
  • The contest format and difficulty level can be gleaned from the archives. This year's format will be essentially identical to last year's.
  • If you are interested in writing for the Team Round, please contact hmmt-problem-czar@mit.edu.
  • Please submit full solutions to all of your problems, and make sure they are correct, if possible. (This is not a joke, it's easy to describe an overconstrained triangle, or nonexistent functions, etc.)
  • If a problem has a solution that is longer than about 1/4 page, then it is probably too hard. With the exception of the team rounds, which were far too hard, the 2005 problems are a good guide to difficulty level. The 2006 problems were too hard.
  • Good problems are not too computationally intensive and do not require obscure knowledge. In particular, students/test solvers should not feel like they want a calculator to solve a problem.
  • Our simplification rules are stringent, so problems should be worded so that their answers have clear canonical forms.
  • We reserve the right to edit your problems, so they may not appear intact.
  • Finally, for uniformity of appearance, the Problem Czar will make diagrams for all of the geometry problems. The geometers out there needn't worry about drawing those pretty pictures.

Before you get rolling, there are a few things to point out. hmmt-discuss is a public list that is used to dispatch information concering problem writing, and later in the year, problem testing. For both security and testing purposes, we want knowledge of the problems to be limited. In particular, problem submissions should not be emailed to this list. Rather, you should email problems directly to hmmt-problem-czar@mit.edu. The preferred format is .tex source, with problem statements and solutions assembled in a logical manner. Using an itemize is particularly encouraged, though not required. Of course, if you don't know or don't want an excuse to learn LaTeX, it's fine to send in problems in a mathematically-comprehensible, copy-and-pastable format.

Again, we need lots of problem submissions to keep the contest quality high. If you can write problems for the contest, please submit them to hmmt-problem-czar@mit.edu. The deadline for submitting problems is November 15.

Test solving

We also need help test solving problems. If you can help with this, sign up for hmmt-discuss and you can test solve over winter break.

Mini-events

During the HMMT, we run mini-events: fun events such as logic puzzles or Set. If you have an idea for a mini-event or would like to run one, please let us know.

This page is maintained by Beth Schaffer <hmmt-webmaster@mit.edu>.