 | | |
| “Video games are just geometric transformations. When the people move, that’s translation. When Super Mario eats a mushroom, that’s dilation.” |
| Tony Zhang |
| |
| “Hello. I am Kiran, and this is Kedlaya. We won’t be teaching combinatorics today.” |
| Po-Ru Loh, as he and Greg Price walk in to the classroom where Kiran is scheduled to lecture |
| |
| Po-Shen Loh: |
“How big is your [Marriage Lemma] list?” |
| Jae Bae: |
“Ohhh, it’s big! I’m such a player!” |
| Hyun-Soo Kim: |
“Except it’s not bipartite.” |
| |
| “You have no chance to survive make your time! Come on, solve this problem!” |
| Po-Shen Loh |
| |
| Po-Shen Loh: |
“You could make an (∞ - 1)-matrix.” |
| Thomas Belulovich: |
“(∞ - 1)…that’s like…really big!” |
| |
| “Well, in my class, we spell ‘pwn’ like this: p-e-r-j-o-n-k-l-e-r-s.” |
| Sherry Gong |
| |
| “Are you making progress on these problems? Or are you making Congress?” |
| Zuming Feng |
| |
| Chuck Straley: |
“Hyun-Soo, I give you permission to pour as much water over Jae as you want in order to wake him up.” |
| Zuming Feng: |
“You can borrow my baseball bat.” |
| |
| “Poor gerbil running that car!” |
| Thomas Mildorf, watching a car screech across the intersection at 10 mph |
| |
| Arnav Tripathy: |
“Can you multiply 390?” |
| Po-Shen Loh: |
“No, but my calculator can!” |
| |
| “Hmm…what do I have to prove…lines a, b, c, d are concurrent? OK. I will attempt to prove this using transitivity.” |
| John Kim, during a team contest. |
| |
| “Quick! Bring a straightjacket!” |
| Thomas Mildorf, as Brian Rice walks by |
| |
| Jae Bae: |
“Is #11 supposed to be an instead of an+1?” |
| Chris Juell: |
“No, it’s an+1.” |
| [several minutes pass; Jae asks about other typos] |
| Jae Bae: |
“Are you sure it isn’t supposed to be 1 minus…” |
| Thomas Belulovich: |
“Jae, stop fishing for typos.” |
| |
| “There are (# of pages you wrote) kinds of mathematicians—those who can count and those who cannot.” |
| Inna Zakharevich writing on Oleg Rudenko’s MOP test, which said “Page 1/3” even though there were only two pages |
| |
| “Ohhh, the explicit formula is so explicit!” |
| Jae Bae, solving the recurrence a1 = 1, a2 = 2, a3 = 24, an = (6an-12an-3 - 8an-1an-22)/(an-2an-3) |
| |
| Thomas Mildorf: |
“I can’t add.” |
| Oleg Rudenko: |
“But can you murderply?” |
| |
| Tony Zhang: |
[8:15] “It is Fibonacci.…By induction it’s Fibonacci numbers.” |
| Tony Zhang: |
[8:16] “I’m telling you.” |
| Tony Zhang: |
[8:17] [silent] |
| Tony Zhang: |
[8:18] “Shit.” “Oh shit.” |
| on the Towers of Hanoi problem |
| |
| “The Rational Root Theorem?…Is there such a theorem?” |
| Tony Zhang |
| |
| Tony Zhang: |
“Take the integers…and take the field of fractions.” |
| Tiankai Liu: |
“And what do we call this field?” |
| Tony Zhang: |
“The fractional field of the integers.” |
| |
| “What’s the formula for tan (x + y)?” |
| Oleg Golberg |
| |
| “People won’t know what Towers of Hanoi are.” |
| Tony Zhang |
| |
| “That’s why there’s no ‘r’ in ‘polynomial.’” |
| Tony Zhang |
| |
| “Shit, this hand sucks!…I'm all in!” |
| Tianren Qi, looking at his hand in Texas Hold’em |
| |
| “I had to have a finesse work and Thomas be stupid. The finesse failed. But Thomas was stupid twice, and I made.” |
| Alex Schwendner |
| |
| “I prefer the Ireland strategy myself. It tends to lead to short games, which I think are my forte.” |
| Alex Saltman, on Color or Country |
| |
| “I'm going to pwn you!” “No I'm going to pwn you!” “OHHHHH!!!!!” |
| Tianren Qi and Ameya Velingker, playing High Card |
| |
| On behalf of the participants of MOP 2004, I’d like to apologize for the severe shortage of MOP quotes this year. I neglected to nag people about it as much as I normally do, and guess who didn’t make the IMO team this year. –Anders |
