When I saw that Purple Comet! Math Meet- The next ten years (2013-2022) came out in the AwesomeMath bookstore, I was super excited. I had been waiting for this to come out for quite awhile. It’s one of the best practice books where you can find problems any topic, any level. Having got to work with Jonathan Kane in AMSP 2020, I was also happy that he was one of the authors alongside Titu Andreescu. The problems are so creative!
In the back of the book there is a “Problems and Difficulty” index. You can choose a problem that is 1. Easy 2. Medium 3. Hard 4. Challenging or 5. Extremely difficult and you can choose what topic you want that problem to be on. This means I can choose the harder problems in my stronger areas and more introductory level for the subjects I need to work on. Since I am looking for hard trigonometry problems and more introductory combinatorics, the guide really helps me find the right problems.
Something funny but great about this book is that some of the problems look easy at first, but there is a surprise difficulty. You might think you see exactly what would work, but it turns out there’s more to the problem that meets the eye. There’s also a wide variety of problems, though they are somewhat related. For example, in 2016 High School Problems there’s a tricky sum you have to evaluate, but the 2015 High School Problems there’s a telescoping product. The variety from year to year makes it really fun!
The authors spent a lot of effort making this book nice. I can tell this by looking at the diagrams. For example, the 2015 Middle School Problems has a problem about a two-pan scale in chemistry lab. The diagram shows the scale and all the different weights drawn to help the problem solver visualize the problem. The illustrations make the problems that much more fun to solve! I’m thankful to have this resource for my problem solving!
