Team Ireland at the 65-th International Mathematical Olympiad 11-22 July 2024, Bath, UK

The IMO is the World Championship Mathematics Competition for pre-college students. Now in its 65th year, it is the Olympiad with the longest tradition among all international science Olympiads. Every year, it gathers more than 600 contestants from more than 100 countries, representing more than 90% of the world’s population. In July 2024, Ireland participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

The team representing Ireland at IMO 2025 consisted of:

Fionn Kimber O’Shea,     6th year Christian Brothers College, Cork

Owen Barron,                  4th year, Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh, Bishopstown, Cork

Zongwen Wu,                  6th year, The High School, Rathgar, Dublin 6

Tianci Yan,                       4th year, Wesley College, Ballinteer, Dublin 16

Grigory Barsegov,           5th year, The Institute of Education, Dublin 2

Dylan Minogue,            4th year, Sutton Park School, Sutton, Dublin13

The team leader was Dr. Andrew Smith (lecturer, UCD),  and the deputy was Tianyiwa Xie (student, University of Cambridge). The initial team selection included

Vitalii Halushko,               4th year, St Vincent’s College, Castleknock, Dublin 15

Unfortunately, UK visa difficulties prevented Vitalii from competing in Bath, leading to the team reserve Dylan stepping in at the very last moment.

Here are the team results at IMO 2024.

Here is an informal report by team deputy Tianyiwa Xie:  “The team earned 4 honourable mentions, which is a wonderful achievement, considering the many challenges we faced this year with last minute visa issues.

We traveled to Bristol before the contest took place, training at the UWE Bristol. Past IMO participants Adam Kelly and Alex Hanley were very helpful with the training sessions, and Arun Shanmuganathan, a past Rwanda IMO leader, kindly taught us functional equations. When not training, we went to food markets, had a boat tour of Bristol, cooked and enjoyed Andrew’s many colourful stories.

We arrived in Bath on the 14th of July. The university was equipped with a sports hall, and the IMO hub had puzzles, games and a 6-flavour popcorn machine. In the evening we won 3rd place in the IMO quiz night, beating powerful opponents. The next day we went to the opening ceremony, where we met old and new friends and took pictures with teams of many countries.

16th of July was the first day of contests. While the students worked on the challenging problems, the deputy leaders were taken on a trip to the Roman Baths, where I learnt the story behind the University of Bath’s logo, and chatted with deputy leaders of Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago and Malaysia. When there was 1 hour left to the exam, we got to see the paper, and I managed to solve Q1 in the time given to us deputies.

The second day of contests includes the now infamous Q5, which I got to try with some other deputies. At one point, we were discussing strategies guaranteeing reaching the bottom in 2021 attempts, when the Japanese deputy sitting next me said “I think you can do it in 3.” None of us believed him at first.

Once the exams were finished, I could finally talk to people freely. This was a bit of a challenge since many of my friends from university were here as coordinators, so we were not allowed to communicate. After the second exam, rumours were already circulating that Q3 and Q6 were very hard, and that very few solves were expected.

For the following two days, the students had their choices among a large variety of recreational and educational activities, while leaders and deputies were involved in coordination. This is a process in which teams of problem coordinators discuss the scripts with leaders and deputies, to insure fair marking for all students. Any disagreements arising need to be solved of common accord before the final jury meeting. Coordination was very interesting, I got to fight over marks with many of my friends from Cambridge who acted as coordinators. For Q2, I faced off against my best friend from university, and she refused to give one more point for one of the scripts (she had a fair point. No friendship was harmed during the making of this report). To my surprise, when marking scripts and preparing for the coordination, I felt a bit like a lawyer fighting for a client. We wrote down key points of argument and haggled for points with prepared graphs and scripts. Anca gave us negotiation tips and her experience was extremely helpful.

In the evenings, we attended wonderful talks by Terry Tao, Maryna Viazovska, Thang Luong and more. But the most popular were probably Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)’s talks, which were of course exquisite. The queue to meet him was massive but we managed to get his signature. Apparently he had Irish heritage, so he took pictures with us and sat with the Irish team for dinner.

The closing ceremony was exciting but the party afterwards was better, because we got unlimited free food. A firework display wrapped up the whole event, and I flew back to Ireland severely sleep deprived. IMO 2024 was a highlight of my year, I learnt so much and gained many new friends and experiences, and I’m very grateful for this opportunity.”

Acknowledgements:

We gratefully acknowledge the support by the Department of Education, which allowed the team of 8 people to travel to Bath. We are grateful for sponsorship by Susquehanna International Group and the Mary Vesey Fund at the Community Foundation.

Following on from its support of Junior Mathematics Enrichment classes in UCD,  Susquehanna has sponsored the Irish team at the International Mathematical Olympiad in July 2024. Support by Susquehanna made possible two training camps for the IMO squad in April and May 2024.

Sponsorship by the Mary Vesey Fund at the Community Foundation allowed us to organise additional on-site training in Bristol.

We would like to thank all the volunteers from 6 centres (UCD, UCC, UL, MU, NUIG, IT Sligo) who worked tirelessly on Saturdays to deliver maths enrichment classes, as well as those who worked on making and marking the IrMO and Team Selection Tests, and training the extended IMO squad. A complete list can be found here.