20 Publications

1976

The background to the 1976 competition is given in Chapter 1. Reference is also made there to the natural early financial difficulty of starting from nowhere, and virtually having to plead to get our printing done in advance of receiving entry fees, etc. Well, as noted there, we also decided to publish a book covering all the information about the competition that year.

Whereas there were other ways of getting the solutions themselves to teachers, in a reasonable amount of time, we saw value in preparing a book which not only had the questions and solutions, but also a range of statistics, comments on the statistics and the names of all prize winners, which was to prove popular with parents of successful students. The book also had an introduction and other notes, for instance on the presentation each year. And it included once the AMC started in 1978 an honour roll of volunteers.

The book was a best seller even in 1976, and formed the basis for true financial independence. We never had to ask for a favour again. In fact we now had cash, which meant that we opened a bank account.

1977 to 1994

As well as this some other books came out. The first was an excellent pedagogical piece by Warren Atkins, Problem Solving via the AMC, in which Warren discussed in detail four particular methods of solving problems which would help students in future AMCs.

After AMOC was formed they decided it would be important to prepare a book The Toolchest, which would be the first time anyone had attempted to list all the problem-solving skills one would need in order to prepare through to participation in an IMO.

After 7 years of the AMC it was decided to publish a composite book of the AMC's first seven years, with statistics. The problems were arranged not as they previously appeared in exam papers but instead groupled in topics, to help teachers in training the students. Even though the problems were complete, as it turned out, the title reflected the earlier aim of just putting some of the better problems (as we saw them). After another seven years we put out a further book on years 8 to 14, entitled More of the Best from the AMC.

And to add to this I had been active with the Tournament of Towns and by 1992 I was ready after translating the questions from Russian and having a number of collaborators, principally Canadian colleague Andy Liu, to submit solutions, and through AMT published a book on the Tournament covering its 6th to 10th year in 1992, and shortly after a book on years 1 to 5 and another on 11 to 15. These allowed us to more easily attract teachers and students to enter the Tournament.

1994 and on

In 1994, as documented in chapters 8 and 9, Peter O'Halloran died and I was appointed first for a temporary preiod, during which I initiated the corporate imaging project, which resulted in the logo. I had dearly loved to be able to publish these books in a theme similar to that of the enrichment series of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). As part of the corporate imaging program (which resulted in, among all other external documentation produced by the Trust, the logo) I arranged for all the current titles to eventually come out as part of a series, and in line with with the new image a design was made to enable the books to come out with systematic appearance. The idea I had was that some people, like collectors, might like to buy the whole set.

My view is that this was a very successful venture, with AMT Publishing becoming an important department of the Trust. The series was endorsed by a number of my high-ranking colleagues from other countries, with the endorsement appearing at the front of the book. Authors from other countries wanted to publish in the series, with the outcome that we also were publishing material from China, Russia, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Israel, and later the USA. The series became as far as I could determine the biggest folio of problem-solving material in the English language other than the MAA Series.

When the third AMC book came out we had run out of titles in the All the Best so we gradually renamed the AMC books simply AMC Book 1, Book 2, etc. By the time of my retirement there were over 30 books in the series, some pedagogical like Warren Atkins' and a series of three written by me in collaboration with Bulgarian colleague Jordan Tabov, which all sold well, and competition problem and solution sets, such as AMC, Maths Challenge, Australian Mathematical Olympiads and Tournament of Towns.

Here is a small sample of some of the book covers as they appeared in 2012.

AMC Book 1.

AMOC's Toolchest Book.

Warren Atkins' Problem Solving via the AMC.

My Methods of Problem Solving, Book 1, coauthored by Jordan Tabov.

Challenge Book 1.

Primary Series

By the late 1990s we had started extending all our events to Primary Schools and by the early 200s we were building up enough material to produce a parallel series of primary books. But here the needs were different in two major respects.

• Whereas our secondary books had been produced in A% the demand here was for A4 and bigger type-face.
• Teachers wanted black line masters and the masters to be in a form that they could deal with a single Master for a single class, say a period of 30 to 45 minutes.

The A4 was no problem and we produced them spiro bound to facilitate the copying. We prepred as discussed below black line masters in books and charged about a 20% premium to allow for the significant permitted photocopying.

The first book to come out was a Challenge one which Bruce had designed, and had material from an earlier version in conjunction with the Mathematical Association of Victoria (for which we obtained MAV approval). Here the black lines were obvious, one blackline corresponded to a problem described over a page.

When it came to AMC though the problems were shorter, so not enough in isolation to fill a page, while a paper of 30 problems was too much for a class. As a result, to meet teacher feedback, we divided each paper into three of approximately equal standards, which proved optimal for class use.

Before I retired there was also a second Challenge book, and also a nice pedagogical book on primary problem solving written by David Kennedy.

T Shirts

Over the period 1996 through until about 2002 I designed a series of T Shirts featuring the mathematicians after whom the Challenge Enrichment Series were named, these being Newton, Dirichlet, Euler, Gauss, Noether, Polya and Turing (the Informatics Enrichment Program which was developed but not proceeded with). Some of these sold better than others. The Euler one, below, featuring the 7 bridges, was the most popular.

In 2012 I designed a further set of four, featuring Fibonacci (the most popular), Pythagoras, Abel, and the nine-point circle. These would have remained on the bookshop catalogue while stocks lasted.

Summary

I should note that David Clark also produced an excellent book on the Australian Informatics Competition, which can be a forerunner for an Informatics series.

Whereas the `Series' described above constitute most of the catalogue, the annual books by AMOC (The Australian Scene) and the AMC Solutions and Statistics Book are major productions. Throughout my time as Executive Director the AMC Solutions and Statistics Books were the biggest sellers, and core of the department, with parents, teachers and school libraries buying annually to keep up their collections.

This is the 2000 version of the AMC Solutions and Statistics book.