ARML 2020 - May 30 and 31, 2020
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
Dear ARML Coaches and Participants,
The ARML Executive Board met on March 15th at our new southern site at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. In our discussions, we attempted to balance our desire to provide a quality mathematics contest against making sure our students and coaches are safe and healthy. Additionally, we face an incredibly uncertain future where we do not know if our usual contest sites will even be available, nor do we know whether anyone will be able to travel to those sites. Even though our usual contest date is two and a half months away, at the moment schools are closed around the nation and teachers and coaches have far higher priorities than trying to assemble ARML teams, hold practices, and arrange travel. Accordingly, we have made the following decisions.
1. ARML will not be held this year. As you may imagine, this was an incredibly difficult decision to make, but in the end, we did not want teams to deal with the risks of site cancellations or travel restrictions, nor did we want to concern parents with sending their children into large group settings that are currently strongly discouraged or outright banned due to infection risk. We do not see any guidance suggesting that the current situation will improve enough by May to the point where holding ARML at our sites would not be an incredibly risky proposition. I would love to be absolutely wrong about this, but we are all numbers people, and none of those numbers look particularly promising at the moment. We apologize to any teams that have already made arrangements to travel to ARML.
2. ARML Local (originally scheduled for April 25th and 26th) will be delayed to the weekend of May 30th and 31st and will be offered to all teams free of charge. With some school closures persisting into April, we believe that many teams will struggle to assemble for ARML Local, much less find a location where they can come together safely to take the contest. It is our hope that by late May, things may normalize somewhat to allow for small groups to assemble to take ARML Local. Additionally, we are considering hosting the contest online at a fixed time on Saturday, May 30th, providing an option for students to compete together from home if they are unable or unwilling to congregate in person to take ARML Local. We are still working out the specifics of this contest and encourage students and coaches to check the ARML website periodically for further details.
3. We are making available on the ARML website an electronic copy of one of our contest books free of charge. ARML exists to provide challenging and interesting problems to our students and to build a community of people excited about mathematics. We wanted to give students an opportunity for math enrichment while normal schooling is otherwise disrupted. Therefore, we have placed a PDF copy of American Regions Math League & Power & Local Contests 2009-2014 on our website. Click here to download the 2009-2014 contest book. We will also publish our new book covering ARML contests from 2015 to 2020 this summer, which will be available on Amazon immediately upon publication and at contest sites in 2021.
I hope we can restore our mathematics community in 2021 and that everyone remains safe and healthy.
Sincerely,
Paul A. Dreyer Jr., Ph.D.
President, American Regions Mathematics League
ARML Local participants in China should contact ASDAN.