Executive Summary

In the Interdisciplinary Contest in Mathematics (ICM) and Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), a team provides a one-page executive summary as the first page of their submission. Despite the guidance in the paragraph below (from the MCM/ICM Contest Instructions website), all too often judges read summaries that do not summarize the entire submission.

To write a good summary, imagine that a reader will choose whether to read the body of the paper based on your summary: Your concise presentation in the summary should inspire a reader to learn about the details of your work. Thus, a summary should clearly describe your approach to the problem and, most prominently, your most important conclusions. Summaries that are mere restatements of the contest problem, or are a cut-and-paste boilerplate from the introduction, are generally considered to be weak.

To help teams do a better job in preparing executive summaries, we offer some specific guidance on the dos and don'ts of writing an executive summary for the ICM/MCM contests.