You are staring at a counting problem. It asks how many ways to distribute ten identical candies among four children. Or maybe it asks for the number of non-negative integer solutions to x + y + z = 7…
Picture this: your child stares at a SASMO problem, pencil frozen. The question gives a final number and asks what happened first. Most students try to guess, but there is a smarter way. The working b…
If you have been looking at past SASMO papers, you have probably noticed something strange. The numbers change, the names in the word problems change, but the core structure of many questions stays th…
When a SASMO problem feels like a locked room with no key, proof by contradiction can be the tool that breaks the door down. Instead of trying to prove something is true directly, you assume the oppos…
The triangle inequality theorem often gets reduced to a simple check: can three side lengths form a triangle? Most students memorize the rule and move on. But in a competition like SASMO, that basic u…
The Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) often feels like a magic trick. You have a number that leaves a remainder of 2 when divided by 3, and a remainder of 3 when divided by 5. Without any obvious starti…
