Please let me know if this question does not belong here.
I have always wondered how the problem-setters for contests like the IMO come up with the problems. The creation of problems like those set at university, or found in textbooks, seem natural — a mathematician uses their years of experience in mathematics to fashion questions from known problems, theorems, and their proofs.
But competition maths seems a bit different. Often it is not as clearly tied with a particularly useful result, or sometimes it comes across as purely for the sake of a competition (I am thinking of those long geometry problems in particular in that case). Yet many of them are really neat, interesting standalone questions, and usually quite tough as well.
I was wondering whether anyone who has taken part in the creation of such questions could share a bit about what the process is like? Does one often operate 'in reverse' (for instance with the hard IMO geometry questions: starting with a construction, mildly arbitrary, and 'erasing' the steps)? Or perhaps asking oneself a question, trying to answer it, and if it is an appropriate amount of difficult, shape it as a question? Would love to hear from anyone with experience in the area.
Best Answer
Disclaimer: I am a high schooler and have never contributed a problem to a very large-scale and prestigious math competition like the IMO. However, every year my school designs problems for a math competition that we administer to middle schoolers, and I write many problems for this competition every year.
In every math competition, there will surely be some students who are able to carry out computations or algorithms abnormally fast or who have memorized a lot of useful formulas. My main goal when writing test questions is to ensure that participants cannot excel on the test by algorithmic/formulaic/rote knowledge alone, but rather have to use some kind of intuition or ingenuity.
One way to do this (that is also used in a lot of higher-level competitions) is to use really large numbers so that the problem can’t be solved by brute force. For instance, consider this problem:
During a math competition, even the quickest students don’t have time to evaluate a function $2019$ times. To solve this problem, the students would have to play around with this function and eventually realize that $f$ satisfies the nice property $f(f(f(f(x))))=x$, from which the answer can be easily obtained.
Another way to prevent students from solving problems formulaically is to design a problem that seems to provide too little information. For example:
For a middle schooler who expects to use the surface area and volume formulas to simply solve for $a,b,c$ and plug in the answers, this problem would stop them in their tracks, because there isn’t actually enough information to find the values of $a,b,$ and $c$, although there is enough information to find the value of $\frac{1}{a}+\frac{1}{b}+\frac{1}{c}$.
Anyways, these examples are only middle-school level problems (or easy high-school level ones) and not representative of the type of competition you’re asking about, but they can at least shed some light on how one designs contest problems.