Skip to content ↓

Quick access! Have a question about applying? Check out all our FAQs, or you can hop directly to First-year application FAQs or QuestBridge FAQs.

MIT staff blogger Chris Peterson SM '13

PSA: CrowdMath, by Art of Problem Solving and MIT PRIMES, is a thing now by Chris Peterson SM '13

a brief note in between committee breaks

A few weeks ago I got an email from Richard Rusczyk. Richard is the founder of Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), an online school and community for people who love math, and we occasionally talk about what’s going on in the advanced math education world.*

Here’s something that’s going on: AoPS and MIT PRIMES (a free, year-long after-school research program for high school students, run by our math department) are partnering for a new initiative called CrowdMath. Richard sez:

…inspired by Terry Tao’s Polymath projects, [CrowdMath] will give advanced high school students a free collaborative research experience with experienced mentors.  [For now], students will discuss preparatory papers. On March 1, we’ll release some open problems for the students to tackle together. If the students reach publishable results, we’ll produce a collaborative paper.

From the CrowdMath website:

CrowdMath is an open project that gives all high school students the opportunity to collaborate on a large research project with top-tier research mentors and an exceptional peer group. MIT PRIMES and Art of Problem Solving are working together to create a place for students to experience research mathematics and discover ideas that did not exist before.

If you’re interested in math research (or are interested in becoming interested in math research), you should check it out!

*Before I started this job, I didn’t know there was such a thing as the advanced math education world. If you didn’t either, you might want to check out this Atlantic article about advanced math education and competition in the United States, which features both Richard and AoPS, along with lots of other great programs and people who I work with semifrequently as an MIT admissions officer.