The medal cuts were set yesterday morning at bronze 16, silver 22, gold 28. These weren’t quite the numbers we had been hoping for…but they still give us a fantastic result of two silver, two bronze, and two honourable mentions. These are New Zealand’s seventh and eighth silver medals; all those without medals get honourable mention (a first^*); and we maintained the standing of 29th country which we acheived last year. Oh, and don’t forget that we’re only two points behind Australia, and have a higher top score!
Following co-ordination today the final scores for the 2011 IMO team are: James Allen, 27; Malcolm Granville, 17; Benedict Morrissey, 13; Arun Shanmuganathan, 22; Tom Yan, 14; Robert Zhang, 21. Our total score is 114 – one point behind the Netherlands, and two behind Australia – and each student has at least one perfect seven. We are now extremely interested in all three medal boundaries, which will be set at the final jury meeting, at 9am tomorrow.
We had some disappointments in co-ordination yesterday, with a flawed solution we thought deserved at least five or six out of seven knocked back to four; and another otherwise perfect solution to problem four knocked back to six, for not explicitly explaining why weights 2^1, 2^2, …, 2^{n-1} formed an instance of the problem for n-1 (just divide them all by two!). There was little to be done about this, however, as similar rulings had already been applied to other teams; and in fact the point off for no-division-by-two wasn’t entirely unexpected. Aside from that things have gone reasonably well, although we do still have one script for problem five rescheduled for later today.
Greetings from the Netherlands! With the second day of competition having taken place yesterday we are now all together again in Amsterdam, and I’m free to write about the events so far. The IMO is moving into its next phase: Ilya and I will be busy with co-ordination, while the team and Stephen go on excursions. Today they will go cycling, while we will co-ordinate problem 3 in the morning, and problems 4 and 5 in the afternoon.
With just a week to go until the opening ceremony, the team gathered at Grafton Hall (University of Auckland) yesterday for a weekend of pre-departure training. Read more »
Our first step in choosing the team to represent New Zealand at the 2012 IMO in Argentina is to choose 24 students to attend a week long training camp in Auckland in January. These students will be chosen using the 2011 Camp Selection Problems (pdf, 111k). Read more »