New Zealand Maths Olympiad Committee online

Shortly before lunch we wrapped up the coordination of the New Zealand papers at the 2009 IMO. For comments and pictures, read on.

Our last coordination was of Problem Four (first problem of the second day). This tricky little geometry problem required the students to find the possible values of a certain angle — the answer being 60 or 90 degrees. Only Malcolm solved the problem completely (and he forgot to check that those angles actually worked) but both Stephen and David had made some progress using trigonometry and/or an analytic approach.

Chris handled the discussions of this problem with the coordinators, while Heather helped out. I sat quietly in the background prepared, at the last minute, to sign the official record (it is IMO policy that only two representatives of a country take active part in coordination of a particular problem). The main issues centred around whether the penalty to Malcolm for failing to do the converse would be 1 or 2 points, and whether or not David or Stephen would get extra marks for “further work” beyond their basic set ups. In fact, in Stephen’s case it was also going to be necessary to dig out of several pieces of rough work the ingredients that were used to cook up the “useful equation”.

Under the pretext of taking some photos, I managed to get a look at the coordinator’s suggestions for our three students: Malcolm – 5, David – 1, Stephen – 0.  So, the eventual settlement at: Malcolm – 6, David – 1, Stephen – 2 represented a good result for us.

Our final scores: Malcolm 16, Ben 8, Stephen 7, David 10, Ha Young 7, Michael 5. Malcolm, Ben, David and Ha Young will obtain (at least) honourable mention, and Malcolm seems relatively likely (fingers crossed) to get a bronze medal.

The final jury meeting is scheduled for tomorrow morning, and should probably take place then as there seem to be relatively few hold ups in coordination.

We’ll wrap up the story later, but for now, thanks to all the students for their great efforts, to May for looking after them here in Germany, to the Dutch leadership for organising our pre-IMO camp, and to all our trainers, supporters and sponsors who made the trip possible.

Chris, Heather and Michael

Chris and Heather chat with the Norwegian leadership while waiting to be admitted to the co-ordination room.

Chis and Heather put our case to the co-ordinators for Problem 4.