Lecture Notes On Mathematical Olympiad Courses: For Senior Section - Volume 1

This is a no-nonsense 4-volume set (2 volumes for the junior section, and 2 for the senior section) for students progressing beyond the Singapore math curriculum in middle school and high schools. The author is a former professor of mathematics at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.The books are organized into short lectures on various topics, with a page or two of definition and summary of key techniques, followed by about 8-10 examples of Olympiad-type short problems, plus concise but clear solutions. The rest of each lecture is populated by about 10-15 actual Olympiad problems from contests held in various countries; less common sources of questions from China, India, Russia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Japan, UK, Vietnam, Singapore and Australia are included, besides the familiar ones from US competitions. The problems have full solutions provided.The 4 books cover a lot of material in condensed form and have a kind of take-no-prisoners conciseness tailored to strong students. It takes a motivated student with a lot of discipline to use these books for self-study. Students needing lots of hand-holding should probably look elsewhere for gentler and slower-pace material (such as the introductory & intermediate series of books from ArtofProblemSolving). That being said, strong students can expect to get up to speed quickly - if they study the examples in depth, diligently work on the manageably small number of 15 questions per topic, and emulate the approaches in the provided solutions.