Archive for the ‘Notes’ Category

Recurrence relations

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 17:06
Posted in category Algebra, Combinatorics

Some notes and problems on finding and solving recurrence relations. Read these if you’ve ever wondered how to find a formula for the Fibonacci sequence!

Symmetric polynomials

Monday, January 26, 2009 15:56
Posted in category Algebra

These notes by Arkadii Slinko explain how to extract information from symmetric polynomials of a set of variables, and how to break any symmetric polynomial down into a few simple ones. The final section gives some applications to triangle geometry.

Functional equations

Sunday, January 25, 2009 1:36
Posted in category Algebra

These notes by Arkadii Slinko cover techniques — some standard, some exotic — for solving functional equations:  groups of substitutions, commutativity, the Cauchy functional equation.

Solutions to some of the problems are available, and can be obtained by writing to nzmathsolymp@gmail.com.

Number theory tutorials

Tuesday, January 20, 2009 23:23
Posted in category Number Theory

This series of short introductory articles by Arkadii Slinko covers some of the most fundamental results in number theory.

Tutorial 1: Divisibility and Primes

Tutorial 2: The Euclidean Algorithm

Tutorial 3: Euler’s Function

Tutorial 4: Primes that are Sums of Two Squares

Tutorial 5: Bertrand’s Theorem

(Update, 24/1/09:  some typos fixed.)

Convex functions

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 21:08
Posted in category Algebra

Notes from Heather Macbeth’s algebra lecture at the January 2009 camp.

(Updated, 12/4/2010)

Techniques for Diophantine equations

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 21:05
Posted in category Number Theory

These notes by Arkadii Slinko outline a number of techniques for solving Diophantine equations.

Solutions for some of the problems are available, and can be obtained by writing to nzmathsolymp@gmail.com.

(Update, 24/1/2009:  some typos fixed.)