[3] The competition is organized and executed in a tightly-knit partnership between the corresponding student groups at Harvard and at MIT.
[4][5] HMMT was initially started as the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament in 1998, and is frequently still referred to as such by much of the math community.
In 2019, it rebranded as just HMMT to meet requirements set forth by the universities, making the name an orphan initialism.
Parents, coaches, chaperones, and non-competing students are also invited to a keynote speaker session, featuring various members of the academic mathematics community.
The most recent keynote speaker in February 2024 was Jeffery Yu, HMMT Tournament Director Emeritus and current physics doctoral student in the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Friday Night Events are held in evening prior to the tournament, including a free dinner and social for students and coaches.
After dinner, HMMT's corporate sponsors and volunteers offer a wide variety of engaging and fun Mini-Events for students.
Some corporate sponsors also hold signature events as part of the Mini-Events, such as Jane Street's Estimathon, Five Rings's Integration Bee Qualifiers, Hudson River Trading's (HRT) Puzzle Hunt, and more.
Students, parents, and coaches also have the chance to speak with representatives from the corporate sponsors, including many alums of the HMMT organizer community, as well as pick up a plethora of merchandise.
Speakers hail from a variety of disciplines and schools, but the majority are math and computer science affiliates at Harvard and MIT.
The difficulty of the February tournament is compared to that of ARML, the AIME, or the Mandelbrot Competition, though it is considered to be a bit harder than these contests.
[7] HMMT is typically sponsored by a combination of school math departments and various industry companies.
During exchanges, participants ranging from first-year members to more senior officers spend the weekend proctoring, grading, and otherwise volunteering at the host competition day-of.