Absolute dedication to a subject is the secret to my – and thus to anyone’s – success. When I’m interested in learning a subject, I immerse myself in the subject, potentially disruptive to my important studies such as schoolwork. But anything that interests me overwhelms my thoughts, impossible to get off my mind. That’s why it’s necessary to like something to learn it well rather than being forced to learn it. For example, with my negative attitude against English in freshman and sophomore year, I never excelled in the subject. But once I realized that English was interesting, I started to get better at the subject. With a fascinated attitude towards math and computer science, I quickly mastered the subjects, absorbing every detail of every exercise that I practiced.

I am a very diverse person who loves the diplomacy of mathematics perhaps more than the subject itself. Mathematics, especially in the foundation of Proofathon, has given me the wonderful opportunity of working with amazing mathematicians from places all around the globe. Allow me to describe my close friends, as they best express who I am. My friend Zi Song Yeoh is an incredible Malaysian boy! He is only age 12 and he has been admitted into the Malaysian IMO training camp. He knows English, Mandarin, and Malay – Malaysia has such a splendid overlap of cultures between Chinese and English influences! Another Malaysian friend of mine, Pi Han Goh, once called me just to say 晚安 (wan an) to me. ♥ My friend Wei Liang Gan from Singapore shares a similar culture with Zi Song. He has been to the IOI! But now, he’s doing national service – did you know that Singapore has mandatory national service because it’s such a small country? He also tells me that Singaporeans listen to American pop music – see the diffusion of culture? My friends Nicolae Sapoval and Dionys Nipomici from Moldova are very great mathematicians. They have both been to the IMO twice with Moldova and are going to attend it for a third time this year. Nicolae has seemingly unlimited Olympiad resources and also a taste of music surprisingly similar to mine. Dionys once told me of what the colors of the Romanian and Moldovan flags meant – blue is for the blue sky symbolizing liberty, yellow is for the wheat fields symbolizing justice, and red is for the blood of the nation meaning fraternity. My friend Kishlaya Jaiswal from India is an amazing web designer and mathematician. Literally, he can do everything in web design; together he and I are unstoppable! Also, he qualified for INMO and came up with an amazing synthetic solution to a non-trivial problem that I posed and could not find a synthetic solution to (if you’re curious, it was finding the zeros of cos x + cos 3x + cos 5x = 1/2). Kishlaya and I are true yaar. My friend Tim Vermeulen from the Netherlands is very much like me. He and I share the same humor and are great friends. I remember when we used to have Skype video calls and solve problems from Titu Andreescu’s 104 Problems in Number Theory. He was only one point away from making the Dutch IMO Training Camp in his first year of Olympiad! My friend Gabriel Merces from Brazil is a pretty great chess (xadrez) player. We play game after game, and we are pretty much equal in skill. He is also the founder of a pretty popular math Facebook page – Studying Maths – and he always posts the best problems to that page (and also to Brilliant.org). My friend Yan Yau Cheng from Hong Kong is only 13 years old and has founded his very own mathematics competition, the Junior Online Math Olympiad (JOMO). He’s on the path to training for Hong Kong’s own IMO team, and he will surely succeed in the future! I have many other best friends from many countries, but if I were to list them all then this response would be a book many pages long.

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My sister’s in college, and I live with my mother, who likes math too.

My mother was always very encouraging, sending me to the best schools and giving me access to the best of resources. One time I woke up at 6:30 and remembered that I had a math competition in Orlando, and she drove me 2-3 hours all the way to Orlando from Palm Beach (2-3 hours)!

I don’t have any idols because idols are people that you admire as superior to you. On the other hand, if you strive to achieve a similar status as someone you admire, then your admiration is the basis for improvement, and that’s acceptable. So I admire Ciprian Manolescu for having three perfect scores at the IMO and anyone who’s really good at synthetic geometry.

Mathematical Olympiad Treasures started my Olympiad math skills and Problems from the Book helped me get into hard math. Anything by Titu Andreescu!

If you do a ton of problems, then you will know a lot of interesting techniques of solving problems. And actually attempt the problems before looking at the solutions! Also, never use barycentric coordinates. Never.

I have no mentor.

Absorb everything you see, especially culture!

Hopefully my most memorable moment will occur at the IMO 2014 South Africa!