🦫 Upstate NY Math Team ARML team update

Feb 09, 2026

Upstate New York Math Team

Mathematical Problem Solving

Dear Upstate New York Math Team,

We had our ARML Kickoff Meeting yesterday morning, and officially started building our team for the 2026 ARML competition at the end of May.

(If you were there, you saw that I experienced some technical difficulties. I figured it out: a bluetooth speaker somewhere in my house grabbed control of my audio. Coach Villani’s presentation was split between my screen and the speaker out of my earshot. Ah, well. Bluetooth.)

The application form to join the Upstate New York ARML Team is now open. Click the button to get started! After the button, please read a message from Coach Babbit.

Apply to our Team!

From Coach Matthew Babbitt:

Dear students, parents, and coaches of Upstate New York,

This February sees several events, and lots of preparation for ARML 2026! Read on for more information about competition opportunities, new guidelines for ARML team selection, a revamped ARML team application, and the start of a textbook list! Many of these updates can also be found at our website: upstatenymath.org

Competition Opportunities

Did you know that the AMC competitions are only one opportunity out of many? There are many regional and online contests that you can do that offer great math problem solving experiences! This past fall we sent teams to competitions like CUBRMC at Cornell, and PUMaC at Princeton. Local leagues sent teams to HMMT November at Harvard. There are even more competitions on the way!

On February 14th Upstate New York will be competing at HMMT February at MIT! Read more about the contest here: https://www.hmmt.org/
The ARML Power Contest is a competition that happens twice a year: once in November, and once in February. This year the February contest window is February 21st to March 7th. This is a contest for local leagues, so Upstate NY will not be fielding teams. If the coach or a parent of your local league is available, they may be able to administer the test for you! Read more about the contest here: https://www.arml.com/ARML/arml_2019/page/index.php?page_type=public&page=5
CMIMC will happen on March 28th at Carnegie Mellon, and we're looking to send a team. Keep your eyes open for an announcement for our registration! Read more about the contest here: https://cmimc.math.cmu.edu/
Purple Comet! is an online competition that is perfect for local leagues to compete in. If your school has a math club, try grabbing some friends, finding a supervisor, and signing up! All you need is a proctor and a room. If space at your school is rare, you could even do the competition in a dining room! If you're a student that's really far away from the rest of the team, Purple Comet! also offers Mixed Team opportunities if you want to do the contest online over a platform like Discord. Distance teams are a new change in 2026! We will probably not be fielding teams from Upstate NY, but that doesn't stop Upstate NY students from forming their own teams! Read more about the contest here: https://www.purplecomet.org/
NYSML is a New York State travel competition happening on April 18th at Webster Thomas High School, just northeast of Rochester. Upstate NY does not field teams to NYSML out of policy. This is a competition for local leagues. If you're near a math team that has 15 or more students, you can contact them to see if you can compete on their team! Read more about the contest here: https://nysml.com/
SMT will happen from April 17th to 18th at Stanford. Going in-person is an ambitious travel goal AND it conflicts with NYSML, so we plan to organize a team for SMT Online. SMT Online will be happening on April 19th. Keep your eyes open for an announcement for our registration! Read more about the contest here: https://www.stanfordmathtournament.org/competitions/smt-2026-online
ARML Local will be happening during the weekend of April 17th to April 18th! This is another contest perfect for local leagues, and as such Upstate NY will not field teams. If the coach or a parent of your local league is available, they may be able to administer the test for you! The registration for this test will open here: https://arml3.com/
The American Masters of Mathematics is a NEW travel competition that will be held for the first time in 2026. It will run from May 22nd to May 25th in Denver, Colorado, and will host maybe 300-400 high school students who will sit for a 5-question, 4.5-hour test, with difficulty at the "high AIME-low USAMO" level. I've been sent some information about the competition and I can tell there will be a high amount of interactivity. This looks exciting! You can join the mailing list and read more about the competition here: https://www.omegausa.org/. They have even posted a syllabus! See here: Omega AMM 2026 Syllabus
There are more math contests that we could be doing that we don't know about. If you want to do a contest that hasn't been listed here, let us know and we can work to make it happen!

Fielding an Upstate NY team needs a lot of organization. We've got a dedicated group of students that have been organizing our travel competitions this year: Alex Kim, Jason Lian, Tianze Qiu, and Brian Sun. Their amazing work is giving us the opportunity to compete at all these travel competitions. Watch out for their announcements for more contests throughout the Spring!

That's all for upcoming regional math competitions. Read on for information about ARML 2026!

ARML Team Selection Guidelines

We have been fielding Upstate NY teams to ARML since 2021, and each year we need to organize ourselves into groups of 15 students, plus alternate students. We have also had to ask students to apply in future years when they're more ready. We want to make this process as transparent as possible, so we have created a document of the guidelines we follow while choosing the teams. They are available on the website right now on our ARML 2026 page.

There are two major changes we are making to the student application process:

The teams are now labeled "Vector" and "Manifold" instead of A and B.
On the application form, students can give their preference as to which team they would rather apply for. We cannot make guarantees that students will necessarily get their choice.

Our goal is to make the application process clear while giving students the agency to advocate for their preferred contest experience. We hope that this helps make everyone's experience as fun as possible!

ARML Application Form

We have made significant changes to the application form. The application reflects the new Vector and Manifold teams. It also includes a new section for parents and guardians who wish to volunteer to help run the contest. ARML is always short on volunteers, and requests 2 volunteers per team of 15. We are very proud to say that we have always had several people volunteer, and this year we're working to make the process smoother! For all volunteers that sign up, we will be sending out information on volunteer training as ARML approaches. There will be trainings held at Penn State on the evening of Friday, May 29th that our volunteers need to attend, and we will send out the room information as soon as we get it.

The application form is live now! It can be found on our website under the ARML 2026 page. Our registration period will end in late April, and we will finalize our teams in May.

Textbook Recommendations

We all know that math is hard, but learning math can be even harder. Getting the right resources can be tricky. To help students get oriented with study materials, we have made a document with textbook recommendations. It includes textbooks that focus on the four subjects of Algebra, Combinatorics, Geometry, and Number Theory at various levels, as well as general textbooks covering all four and topics textbooks covering a specific area of a subject. The document also has our advice on how to read textbooks, where to get used books, how to read solutions to get the most out of them, and how to improve at math in general. This document is live on the website now under the Training page.

Thanks Coach Babbitt.

I want to add that you must apply to be on this year’s ARML team, even if you were on the team last year. Team members must live or study in New York state, but not Long Island, New York City, or Westchester County, which all have their own ARML teams.

Please help us connect with math students around the state. Share this email with them and encourage them to apply.

Sincerely,

Japheth

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Japheth Wood is a coach for the Upstate New York Math Team and also a math professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

P.S.: Please make a gift to the Upstate New York Math Team. Support mathematical problem solving in Upstate New York! We will run a Pi Day giving campaign.