MOPper World 2.0
About MOP#
This section of the website is dedicated to public-facing material from various years of MOP. It’s similar in spirit to the MOPper world that ran between 1997 and 2004. This page isn’t a puzzle.
MOP is a three-week camp now held at CMU. In 2020 and 2021, the camp was run on Discord. Prior to 2015, the camp was held in Nebraska. See FAQ CR-7 for invitation rules.
Today, the camp is headed by director Po-Shen Loh and assistant academic director Evan Chen. (There is no academic director or assistant director.) Staff includes instructors, RA‘s, and teaching assistants (aka graders).
For many years, the official name for MOP was “MOSP”, but the letter S was universally ignored by staff and students, and its omission became an ongoing gag. The S was finally officially deleted in 2017.
MOP Puzzle Hunt#
- MOP 2021 puzzle hunt, a miniature one-round hunt written by Evan Chen, Isabella Quan, Sanjana Das, and Serena An.
T-shirt designs#
Traditionally, MOP T-shirts are printed in black on grey. With the exception of 2020, usually there is only a front design, and the back contains everyone’s signature.
Problems#
- The ELMO is written by returning MOPpers for new MOPpers, featuring “teams” and coordination. See ELMO page.
- The Mock IMO is run by staff using ISL; it also features a mock coordination. You can download the problems here:
- The staff also provide MOP homework to work on before camp starts, mostly for fun and so people have something to talk about at airport. Here are recent homework problems:
Schedules#
Singing troupe#
The MOP Singing Troupe is a tradition dating back to around 2010, started by Evan o’Dorney; it starts and ends the closing ceremony. Here are recent songs we peformed:
- A Million Dreams
- Defying Gravity
- Defying Gravity
- Good For You
- My Eyes
- My Heart Will Go On
- Requiem
- Unravel (English version)
- A Million Dreams
- Defying Gravity
- Memory
- My Eyes
- Rewrite the Stars
- Defying Gravity
- Do You Hear the People Sing
- I’m a Rock
- Memory
- On My Own
- One Short Day
- Popular
- Shall We Dance
- The Music of the Night
- The Phantom of the Opera
- The Point of No Return
- The Wizard and I
- Defying Gravity, and parody Coordinate Bashing
- Do You Hear The People Sing, and parody Do You Hear the Teapot Sing
- Finite Simple Group of Order Two
- Memory
- Music of the Night
- One Short Day
- Shall We Dance?
- Think of Me
- Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again
- Wonderful
Quotes#
- Alex Zhao: “Combo is only enjoyable when you can solve it.”
- Ethan Liu: “I kinda don’t want to do any more math, I just want to do algebra”
- Evan Chen: “I get crabby when people don’t do what I tell them to. It’s why i can never have a boss.”
- Evan Chen: “I hate trying to be nice.”
- Evan Chen: “I’m Evan. I guess I’m a PhD student at MIT?”
- Evan Chen: “Most problems require you to be awake.”
- Evan Chen: “Where’s Po? I think I actually need him for once.”
- Holden Mui: “almost to 3 hours” (during office hours)
- Jeffrey Chen: “Base times height is not area. This is probably a useful fact to know.”
- (right after) “Just to check, $\frac{K}{2a}$ is the height of a triangle, right?”
- Jeffrey Chen: “Is fermented spit not fine?”
- Noah Walsh: “The lesson I am learning from this is: when you see hard combo, take a nap”
- Raymond Feng: “OP STICK”
- Serena Xu: “Panel topic: why don’t you want to be a panelist?”
- Evan Chen: “I trust the Russians.”
- Holden Mui: “How many points do we get for misreading the problem?”
- Solutions packet for Test 7: “By trying to make all three of $(x+1)(x+2)$, $(x+1)(x+3)$, $(x+2)(x+3)$ squares, we may try the substitution $x + 2 = \frac{(t^2+1)^2}{4t(t^2-1)}$.”