Combinatorial Extremization: In Mathematical Olympiad and Competitions

In China, lots of excellent students who are good at maths takes an active part in various maths contests and the best six senior high school students will be selected to form the IMO National Team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In the past ten years China's IMO Team has achieved outstanding results — they have won the first place almost every year.The author is one of the coaches of China's IMO National Team, whose students have won many gold medals many times in IMO.This book is part of the Mathematical Olympiad Series which discusses several aspects related to maths contests, such as algebra, number theory, combinatorics, graph theory and geometry. The book elaborates on methods of discrete extremization, such as inequality control, repeated extremum, partial adjustment, exploiting symmetry, polishing transform, space estimates, etc.