It’s an honor for me share that my problem got shortlisted for International Math Olympiad 2021 and now the problem is public.

This is the first time ever that a problem from Bangladesh got shortlisted in this prestigious event.

There were 175 problem proposals from 51 different countries and 32 problems got shortlisted.

I would like to thank my friend Anton Trygub from Ukraine for tremendous help with the proof of the solution to the problem. I came up with the problem while preparing my Codeforces round which Anton was coordinating and he suggested sending it to IMO instead. So I contacted Mahbub Majumdar sir, the IMO team leader of Bangladesh, and he sent it to IMO. Also, thanks to Jubayer Nirjhor for testing the problem.

Lastly, I would like to thank Munir Hasan sir and others for always encouraging everyone to participate in Math Olympiads. I also regret myself not doing Math Olympiads in my school days as I didn’t even hear about it back then even me being a decent math enthusiast. I think we should encourage students to participate in Math Olympiads as this will literally improve their problem-solving ability which will help them create wonders in the future(literally).

You can find the problem and solution here(my problem is A3): https://www.imo-official.org/problems/IMO2021SL.pdf and also some discussions here: https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c6h2882539_minimize_expression_over_permutation