Overview
The Purple Comet! Math Meet has been running every spring since 2003, and over that time it has built a quiet reputation as one of the more substantive math contests a middle or high schooler can take on. Thousands of teams from across the world enter each year, working through a problem set that ranges from approachable to genuinely hard. The contest is free, fully online, and designed by Dr. Jonathan Kane, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) editorial board, and Dr. Titu Andreescu, a former head coach of the US Math Olympiad team. What sets the experience apart shows up in the structure: teams of up to six students work the problems together, dividing them up, comparing approaches, or huddling over the ones that don't crack easily.
How the Competition Works
A ten-day contest window opens each spring, and the team's adult supervisor picks any block of time inside it to compete. Once the clock starts, the team has a fixed amount of time to submit as many answers as possible:
- Middle school level: 20 problems in 60 minutes
- High school level: 30 problems in 90 minutes
The problems are designed so that even strong teams will not finish everything in the allotted time. Teammates can split up the problems, work shoulder-to-shoulder, or compete from different locations and communicate by phone or video — all valid strategies. Topics for middle school cover arithmetic, elementary algebra and geometry, counting, probability, and number theory. The high school set adds combinatorics, trigonometry, advanced algebra, functions, and conic sections. No problem requires calculus.
Who It's For
Picture a Saturday afternoon spent arguing with three friends about whether a problem is really a geometry question in disguise. Purple Comet! rewards the kid who likes that argument — who finds it more interesting to wrestle with a hard problem alongside others than to grind through worksheets alone. Strong math skills help, but the contest is built for teams, which means a student who is sharp on probability can lean on a teammate who sees geometry clearly. Kids who already love math circles, AMC-style problems, or just thinking out loud with friends tend to find it a natural fit.
Judges & Mentorship
The contest is designed and judged by its founding mathematicians: Dr. Jonathan Kane and Dr. Titu Andreescu, formerly director of the Mathematical Association of America's (MAA) American Mathematics Competitions. There is no in-contest mentorship — this is a pure competition — but the problems themselves carry the imprint of decades of olympiad-level problem design.
What Makes This Different
Most high school math competitions are individual events, or treat the "team round" as a secondary piece of a larger individual contest. Purple Comet! inverts that: the team is the unit, problems are specifically designed for collaboration, and team members can compete from anywhere as long as they're communicating with each other. For a kid who learns best by thinking out loud with friends — and who finds the social side of problem-solving as motivating as the math itself — that structure is rare and worth seeking out.
Application & Eligibility
- Open to students worldwide enrolled in middle school or high school
- Teams of 1 to 6 students
- Each team must have an adult supervisor age 21 or older
- Eight team categories total — competitive teams enter as small school, large school, or mixed team; non-competitive teams are also available
- Supervisor registration opens February 1 and runs through the end of the contest
Cost & Information
- Entry: Free
- Format: Online; teams compete on their own computer with an internet connection
- Typical timeline: Held annually in the spring, with a ten-day competition window
- Awards: Certificates of merit for top-performing competitive teams. The contest occasionally distributes donated nominal prizes to winning teams. No cash prizes.