Mathematical Olympiad Program
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The Mathematical Olympiad Program or MOP is an intensive summer program held at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The main purpose of MOP, held since 1974, is to select and train the six members of the U.S. team for the IMO. Students qualify for the program by taking the USAMO; the top twelve scorers from all grades form the "black" group, which is eligible for selection to the IMO team. The approximately eighteen highest scorers among the remaining non-graduating students (i.e. non-seniors) form the "blue" group. (These colorful designations were adapted from Karate.) In 2004, the program was expanded to include approximately thirty of the highest-scoring freshmen each year, the "red" group.
In 2006 the USAMO cutoff scores were 25 for black MOP, 18 for blue MOP, and 9 for red MOP.
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[edit] Locations
The first few MOPs were held at Rutgers University. After that, and until 1995, the program was alternately hosted by the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in even-numbered years and by Army at West Point in odd-numbered years. The 1995 MOP was held at IMSA in Aurora, Illinois, where then-MOP director Titu Andreescu was a member of the math faculty. Most of the MOPs from 1996 on forward have been held in Lincoln, Nebraska where the AMC headquarters is located. An exception was made in the summer of 2001, as the United States would be hosting the IMO that year in Washington, D.C., and nearby Georgetown was selected as the location for MOP.
[edit] Naming controversy
When the program started, the official abbreviation was MOP. At some point in the early nineties (if not earlier), however, the official abbreviation was changed from "MOP" to "MOSP" (for "Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program"). The veteran "MOPpers" balked at this change, preferring the traditional "MOP" (among other reasons, because "MOPpers" is much more euphonious than "MOSPers"). Resistance to the change is evident in the contest to design the T-shirt logo, wherein "MOP" is much more popular than "MOSP" to put on the winning logo, despite the official name change.
While this conflict has been ongoing for over ten years, each new generation of MOPpers seems to have taken it on as their own struggle, a struggle against perhaps the "grown-ups" who preside over the program, though these days even many instructors avoid the term "MOSP." Besides the annual T-shirt logo contest, there are other ways in which the conflict manifests. In the mid-nineties, for example, there was a joke about the "S" being silent; this has evolved into the occasional name "MO(S)P" or "MOsP." The 1996 Rookie Team Contest included a geometry problem involving points M, O, S and P, where the solution required the use of geometric inversion to send point S infinitely far away. (An alternate solution involved sending a fifth point T_2 infinitely far away; the problem was given with a hint to steer students toward the first solution.) More recently, there was a combinatorics problem on the ELMO shortlist about someone visiting all the UNL buildings in certain patterns in an attempt to add the S everywhere. When he passed a building the first time, they added the S, but if he passed the same building a second time, they reconsidered and removed it again. Needless to say, he was unsuccessful.
[edit] Year-round MOP
For years, the idea of extending the training program for the U.S. IMO team was discussed. During the 2004-2005 school year, U.S. IMO team coach Zuming Feng directed the Winter Olympiad Training Program, utilizing the Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) site for discussion purposes. The program was short-lived, lasting only that year. It is the wish of many students that this illustrious program will be reinstated, although no such plans are known of.
