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IMO 2015 Diary – Part Three

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Wednesday 8th July

Because of my complicated post-IMO itinerary, AirAsia will be a major feature of my life over the coming weeks, so perhaps I should be careful what I say. First impressions are not good. The online check-in software would have been out-of-date in the late 90s, and within an at the time completely empty plane, the algorithm assigns us seats 23A, 23B, 23C, 23D, 23E, 23F, 24A and 8F. Still, you get what you pay for, and we did not pay a lot at all. What we get is a flight to Thailand, during which we meet the Malaysian team, and our own students attempt one of the hardest outstanding problems from last year’s shortlist.

We arrive in Chiang Mai, and find an impressive greeting party from the IMO, who seem organised, keen to present us with garlands, and even more enthusiastic about taking photos than me. Our guide, Korn, leads us onwards to the Lotus Hotel, where the students will be staying for the duration of the competition. Our initial impression is that the rooms are lovely, the lobby is full of familiar faces, and the dessert is bright blue jelly. So far seems an excellent venue choice.

I’ve been in touch with BBC World about a live interview tomorrow morning. There’s been some confusion with photographs, so they are particularly keen to talk to Neel about his experiences as a girl attending international maths camps. Even in the event of finding an alternative narrative arc, the arrival of 600 technophile teenagers is putting strain on the hotel’s wifi. Skype seems a distant possibility, given the difficulty even in following an exciting first day of the (original) Ashes, featuring our second favourite prodigious Joe, via text. The Anglophone viewers of SE Asia will have to contain their excitement for now.

Thursday 9th July

We are up painfully early, in order to arrive painfully early at the opening ceremony. We have our first experience of songthaew, the ubiquitous red taxi minibuses. Though rather reminiscent of a police van, at least it’s a chance to get to know each other better. The team have brought their flags and brushed up smartly, and seem keen to pose with everyone who asks. Security is very tight – we are scanned repeatedly and our temperatures taken. We have a three hour wait, the giant hall is very stuffy, and it’s not clear whether we will be allowed to leave in a medical emergency. Five of the team work on C8, while Joe continues his quest to experience the first aid facilities at every IMO he attends. The room is very well-equipped, and the staff seem keen to use as much of the equipment as possible on Joe, but eventually they are persuaded that a horizontal surface and a glass of water will more than suffice in this instance. I find this gently air-conditioned room by some margin the most pleasant place in Chiang Mai so far.

All of this endeavour is for the benefit and protection of the princess, who as an enthusiastic supporter of STEM and enrichment is guest of honour. Her throne is suitably gold, and her entrance suitably Sheba-esque. Because of the presence of royalty, we are informed that our team procession across the stage must be formal – no projectile key rings this year. She departs with commensurate fanfare at the end of a remarkably short ceremony with a tragic lack of folkloric dancing, then there is the opportunity for more spontaneity, and an infinite number of photographs. The trend of the past two years that UK team members should carry others on their shoulders at such events seems to have become firmly established, to the chagrin of risk assessment form writers everywhere, though Sam and Warren appear reliable chariots this time. I try to ask as many of the officials as possible what their medals are for, but it’s tough getting many replies. I guess Thais are uniformly very heroic.

The afternoon stretches out somewhat, so we visit the Suan Dok temple, where everything is gold or brilliant marble. Apparently anyone who rings all of the many bells and gongs that line the perimeter will become famous, and some of our team gleefully test this hypothesis, to the annoyance of the many feral dogs who had been enjoying a mid-afternoon snooze in the grounds.

The students are keen for an early night, but not before a dance-off to some Thai music videos. While channel-hopping, they find coverage of the opening ceremony on the news, including a brief clip of our sashay and bow across the stage. We were not together. At all. Jill and I retire to the lobby, where no-one seems to have the heart to tell the hapless Elvis impersonator that he has forgotten to turn on his microphone.

Friday 10th July

The students are up fairly early for the first paper. They are allowed to take in a ‘talisman’ small enough to fit in their hand, and a kedondong each, lovingly rescued from Malaysia, seems the perfect choice. There is a mixture of nerves and excitement, but the algorithm for getting 500 contestants into 500 desks seems sensible, and so there is little for me to do except offer best wishes.

During the exam itself, the deputy leaders were whisked off to visit an elephant sanctuary. I remain ambivalent about the principle of teaching animals to perform tricks, but at least this show was tasteful, with a penalty shootout building to a triumphant climax unfamiliar to England fans, and a sequence of live paintings that were genuinely remarkable. I also take the chance for a short ride. It is clear that going uphill is a great deal more comfortable than lurching downhill, especially when steps are involved. It was a memorable experience to see these magnificent animals up close, and I hope the existence of such places helps towards conservation in the wild too.

We return to meet the students directly after the exam. Warren seems unimpressed by Q2, despite having solved it, while the others’ moods range from disappointed to bitterly disappointed. We move on though, especially since it will turn out that many comparable countries have a similar reaction to this question, for which the crucial division into cases is more tedious than one might hope for under competition time pressure.

Mindful that the hotel is likely to be rife with unhelpful gossip all afternoon, the UK team and Luke from Ireland head off for the old walled city in the centre of Chiang Mai. First a museum of the region’s cultural heritage, with plenty of information about basket-weaving, and some answers to Neel et al’s further questions about karma, such as whether it is a universal conserved quantity. The Lan Chang temple offers further sleeping dogs, gilded dragons and the chance to meditate on the fact that there’s more to life than technical number theory problems. We go again tomorrow.

Saturday 11th July

The second paper dawns. Neel and Joe seem to be competing to see who can wear the team polo shirt for the most days consecutively, so again we watch our mostly turquoise band file through the various entrances into the exam hall. The deputies have nothing to do this morning, so John from USA and James from Canada and I attempt to go walking up the lower reaches of the Doi Suthep mountain. Despite about 600,000 hits on Google for ‘Chiang Mai hike’, both our guides and the hotel staff tell us this is literally impossible, but recommend walking along the side of the three-lane highway instead.

The hikes mentioned online turn out to be literally entirely possible. I briefly slip flat on my back, and now have the exact imprint of a bottle cap in the middle of my spine, but otherwise it is entirely enjoyable. Lunch at a nearby restaurant offering North-Eastern Thai food is incredible, and it’s lucky the exam is finishing soon, otherwise I would have happily eaten twice my body weight.

We return to find the lobby overwhelmed with the news that today’s paper was hurriedly rewritten last night, after the original version was revealed accidentally to some DLs yesterday. The British students are again unhappy. It’s been a long year of enjoyable mathematics and worthwhile training, and no one likes to see it end in tears of frustration. But maths competitions are exciting precisely because sometimes even strong students struggle, and it doesn’t reduce the value of the mathematics they have experienced together during preparation.

While that might hold in abstract, in practice it seems sensible to find more active immediate distraction. We find a path to the bottom of a waterfall, then a trail to the top of the same waterfall through the jungle. Lawrence enjoys using a leaf almost as long as himself as a fan, and Warren, leading our march, regularly shakes a particularly luscious tree besides the path, to induce a refreshing shower onto those bringing up the rear. By the end, we are all sweatier, but I hope also more grounded about the cosmic importance (or not) of making the most shrewd substitutions in a functional equation.

Geoff is now allowed to see the students, and we enjoy a relief from rice with a rare Western meal, before I transfer to the leaders’ hotel, where we will be working hard at the scripts over the next few days.

IMO 2015 Diary – Part Two

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Saturday 4th July

The morning brings double embarrassment. My weekend alarm is still on UK time, so I arrive at the practice exam a) late; and b) to discover that I’d already set a question from today’s paper for one of our selection tests in May. Andrew and I scramble to find a suitable replacement in the knowledge that this day can only get better.

The end of the exam brings news from the UK, in the form of an article about Joe in the Guardian, featuring punditry from Geoff, and a cameo quotation from Warren, quashing some of the more ludicrous claims in another recent account, which, though entertaining, is about as reliable as the Sunday Sport. Neel spends much of the rest day standing in front of a blackboard staring slightly off to the left into a strategically-placed desk lamp, practising for when his own moment of fame, and accompanying photoshoot comes about.

The UK students have lived up to their star billing, producing some stylish solutions to an algebra question, and marking is pain-free. After a slightly questionable Indonesian meal, Jill and I try to find the fruit our team have requested as exam refreshments. The closest thing I can find to grapes are kedondong, and these turn out to be almost entirely unlike grapes, with a hard leathery outside covering a hard woody inside. Harvey is unimpressed.

Sunday 5th July

These exams are not supposed to be especially comfortable, but those among us who sampled the chilli and peanut sauce last night now have 4.5 painful hours to ponder the consequences of our decisions. Today’s scripts are also rather bloated, with a set of competent but vague combinatorics essays to wade through. If Wagner wrote mathematical arguments, they would be like this: impressive length, with occasional dramatic conclusions separated by long passages where nothing of any importance really happens.

Wanting a break from the eternal air conditioning, Sam, Lawrence and I head for a walk through the suitably steamy path leading up the hill through the jungle behind the school. It doesn’t really lead anywhere except a radio mast, so we soon find ourselves back in the diplomatic precinct. This poses a map-reading challenge since every street is called ‘Diplomatic Street’. Furthermore, one cannot rely on landmarks since, despite the Malaysian government’s prompts, only Iraq has actually got round to building an embassy here.

I am pleased to see that our students are eating the kedondong, if only as the bankruptcy forfeit for their endless poker game, which I’m also pleased to see has displaced some of the more inane traditional maths camp card games.

Monday 6th July

To mix things up, today the UK students have chosen an exam paper for the Australians, which they mark in the early afternoon, and vice versa. The point of this exercise is to force the students to learn first-hand what makes written work easy to understand, or otherwise. Warren and Lawrence have a number of subtle ‘case bashes’ to check, but Australians Jeremy and Seyoon have the short straw, with another set of UK essays, this time about moving dominos around. However, they’ve really engaged with what our students have and haven’t done, so when Andrew and I check that everything is in order, there are no major surprises. This leaves time for me to give a short talk on the Lovasz Local Lemma, which is fairly well-received, though everyone seems surprised that so much extra machinery gets you only an extra factor of \sqrt{2} on the lower bound for Ramsey numbers.

As we have a bit more free time, Jill and I take the opportunity to visit Putrajaya’s two giant mosques. Jill’s efforts to dress appropriately ‘decently’ are in vain, as she is compelled to wear a giant burgundy hooded coverall for the duration. The stark ‘iron mosque’ includes a shopping arcade, and its main prayer room can fit 25,000 worshippers, who are I’m sure grateful for the air-conditioning hidden, our guide tells us, in the pillars. The Putra Mosque is just as pink on the inside, leaving Worcester College’s chapel green with envy.

Tuesday 7th July

It’s the final practise exam, deemed to be the Mathematical Ashes, which for the second time in three years finds itself well-timed in relation to its cricket counterpart. There is a both a trophy and an urn full of charred (mostly British) mathematics, which were only found hidden in a cupboard in Leeds last week, so they are not with us. Naturally, this has been interpreted as a sign of our confidence in retaining the title, and typical colonial arrogance.

It appears initially that no-one will be earning the title, as we are locked out of our usual classroom, and the alternative has plenty of sofas, but neither tables nor chairs. All is resolved quickly, and before too long, it’s time for another marathon bout of marking. About five hours later, Andrew and I have met to agree our marks and are able to make the dramatic announcement that this year we have a tie, on 84 points apiece. And no, we didn’t fiddle it. If nothing else, I’m definitely not good enough at addition to track these sorts of sums in my head.

And so the spoils, and the celebrations are shared. Our final Malaysian meal involves multi-coloured dim sum by the far side of Putrajaya Lake. Almost certainly the most greens some of the team have eaten all week…

IMO 2014 – Part Two – Training Continues

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Thursday 3rd July

Now that there is less compulsion to be rushing away, we decide to start the exam at the more civilised hour of 8.30am. Angelo, the Australian leader, decides it will be minimally confusing to set the giant clock in our exam room to start at 9am, as it would in the IMO proper. The UK team have spent some time over the past few days discussing when and whether various functions attain their minima, and I feel this may not be a good example. Anyhow, Q1 is found rather easy, Q2 is found very difficult, and only Gabriel has the courage to cut his losses and move on, and provides a beautiful proof of the combinatorial Q3. The prize for most effortless solution to the inequality goes to Frank. Warren wins the prize for geometry rough work closest to getting a pity mark, but does not in fact win a pity mark.

At least it makes grading rather straightforward, leaving time to accompany some of the UK and Australian team on a walk beyond the university up the side of Devil’s Peak. Jethro the hotel’s German Shepherd, described in the guidebook as ‘a teddy bear with boundary issues,’ has taken a strong liking to Joe, and seems reluctant to allow him to leave and roam loose on the mean streets of Rondenbosch. Once we’ve negotiated this amusing (to everyone else) hurdle, all goes smoothly, and the glowing pink sunset on the trek down is more than worth the energy expended. I make arrangements so that the team can watch France-Germany over dinner, and in fairness they are unfailingly polite in letting me know that the match is not in fact until tomorrow. I feel I am ill-qualified to choose toppings for a set of twelve takeaway pizzas, but am reassured by everyone that the decision to avoid Bacon and Banana is a wise one.

Friday 4th July

To introduce some novelty into the daily routine, today the UK team has chosen three questions for the Australians to attempt, and vice versa. They will then have to mark the solutions, and co-ordinate these marks with Andrew, the Australian deputy, and myself. The first round is straightforward enough, once we have found a room for the task that is not playing host to an angle grinder. The Brits have chosen questions which will be easy to mark, so perhaps they do not get as much out of the exercise as they might have done, but it is nonetheless useful to see how other people like to write up ideas, and also to feel what level of rigour is easiest to follow critically. There are more difficulties with the reciprocal arrangement, as the questions are more fiddly, or at least have more cases, and some of our students seem to have relished the opportunity to add elements of mystery to their solutions wherever possible.

Meanwhile it has been pouring with rain outside all afternoon. It is nice to learn from the ITV commentators that not only is it 35C in Rio but that the weather is also lovely all across Northern Europe. All is well though: we have tea.

Saturday 5th July

If this were the Ashes proper, the swing bowlers would be licking their lips in anticipation of starting soon after an early lunch. In the Mathematical Ashes, no such quarter is given to the weather, and both Australian and UK teams brave the pouring rain up the hill to start our final training exam on time. Of course, this exam has extra bite, as the results will be published on Joseph Myers’ website and to the winner will be the spoils. In this case, it’s a brass urn filled with the charred remains of some geometry circa 2008 from my second IMO in Madrid. As a sign of colonial arrogance, or perhaps because BA has an upper bound on baggage mass, we haven’t brought the trophy this year from UKMT towers in Leeds, so the team have the added pressure of avoiding an embarrassing and expensive (in postage terms) turnaround.

I’ve decided to rewrite Q2, which features a ‘crazy scientist’ investigating something which looks almost exactly in everything except name like a finite simple graph. It seems simpler to call it a finite simple graph, and give a name to the crazy scientist. In any case, I have to mark this question, and it turns out to be the deal-breaker, with beautiful solutions from Joe, Warren and Harvey taking the UK to 59 points to Australia’s 50, despite an outstanding 21/21 from AUS1 Alex Gunning. A small wager once again rides on how long will elapse between emailing Joseph Myers, and the result appearing on the BMOS website. Standards are slipping clearly, as the interval is greater than five minutes this year, though substantially less than ten. Rather than basking in their success, the UK team are keen to spend more time discussing esoteric Euclidean geometry. The hotel’s blackboard proclaims the proverb of the day as “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are,” but it seems that the over-arching thought for the day here is “no famous triangle centre lives on the inner Soddy circle.” Famous last words.

Sunday 6th July

The UK IMO delegation has a rich history of incompetence regarding accommodation, and it is reassuring to learn this morning that these traditions continue to flourish. Harvey and Frank learn the hard way that 15 minutes before check-out time is the maximally inconvenient time to lose your room key. I await with keen anticipation the email from reception telling us they found it down the back of someone else’s sofa. Today we are moving from our guesthouse to the IMO itself, a 400m walk down Rondenbosch Main Road. A patch of pavement along the way described by Geoff as ‘literally impossible for suitcases’ turns out to be literally possible for suitcases, but otherwise this is an uneventful final leg of our journey, at least relative to the dozens of teams flying into Cape Town from all over the world this morning.

Once at the UCT towers of accommodation everyone receives a goodie bag of programmes, umbrellas and IMO stationery, and a room. Apart from Frank, who merely gets a goodie bag. This is a hugely stressful day for the IMO organisers, and this one was definitely by far the most efficient of the four I’ve experienced, but the difference between our levels of concern and their levels of concern on this matter is mildly concerning. In the end everyone gets a bed on which to relax and examine their loot. I’ve got the sub-warden’s room, which appears to mean nothing apart from having a kitchen sink rather than a bathroom version, and having a view inwards rather than towards the mountain like the students on the other side of the building, which, incidentally, is shaped rather like the emblem of the Isle of Man.

It also becomes clear that this is going to be the week of the thousand sleeveless sweaters, which given the temperature in the rooms may be getting more use than planned. We see the signs reminding resident undergraduates to bring a heater and laugh coldly. Our guide appears to be indisposed, so senior guide Julian offers to take us for a short tour through part of central Cape Town. Highlights include the exotic trees and attention-seeking squirrels in the Company Gardens, and a market mainly featuring African curios, selling more exorcist masks than you could shake a stick at.

I go for a run round the campus, and fall down a very small flight of steps after being distracted by a flock of ibis and Egyptian geese. They continue to cackle at my misfortune, but I nonetheless return in time for the essential tour of the dining area. Frank and Gabriel seem highly enthused by the volumes of mayonnaise available. No other enthusiasm is visible except for the end of the Wimbledon final, and the possibility for several rounds of bridge, alternating with attacks on past shortlist problems. Gabriel’s and my bidding patterns might charitably be described as unconventional, but seem to work surprisingly well together. More relevant intellectual challenges await though, so it is an early night all round.

IMO 2013 – Part Two: Ashes and Santa Marta

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Thursday 18th July

The third practice exam again proceeds smoothly. The first problem is a nice exercise by John Conway, on classifying sets of points which obey some intersection property. There were various ways to misread the problem, of which some students took full advantage, and an almost limitless number of ways to classify the satisfactory configurations. As a result the marking, which I chose to do outside, took ages, though at least I had the company of a few passing green lizards and a brief visit from an eagle.

The resort where we are staying, and in fact where the IMO itself will be held, is actually about 10km outside Santa Marta itself, so we decide to venture in to explore the town once marking is complete. The historical centre, though modelled on a grid, is very Mediterranean, with narrow streets wending their way underneath exposed municipal wiring down to the seafront. We pause outside the Cathedral, where Mass is just starting. The dry heat clearly not enough to discourage a very full and colourful set of vestments.

On the way down to the sea we pass a park featuring yet another statue of the most famous man to live (and in fact die) in Santa Marta. Our guide Maria looks horrified as one of the students asks “Simon Who?” Dinner ends up al fresco, where we are treated to the accordion playing and fire-juggling in the town square. How does some one take up fire-juggling one wonders? Are there beginner kits with just lightbulbs on the end? Very few of the party receive the meal they think they ordered, but all are satisfied nonetheless. The convoy of taxis departs into the night. I am in the second one and it is clear that the driver has no idea where he is going, and his dedication to staying within sight of his leader is admirable if occasionally terrifying.

Friday 19th July

To mix things up, today each team has set an IMO-style paper for the other to attempt. The UK team then has to mark the Australian scripts during the afternoon and vice versa, before co-ordinating the results with Ivan the Australian deputy leader and myself. It’s always a profitable exercise to have to struggle with poorly worded solutions as perhaps it will encourage everyone to avoid such things in the actual exam. Questions which fall into the realm of the combinatorial essay are always particularly at risk of large blocks of waffling prose, and each Q2 produces exactly that. Hopefully the students found the exercise useful as well as time-consuming.

Meanwhile, it seems that the UKMT-branded frisbees we ordered to distribute as gifts at the IMO have been held up somewhere in the intricacies of Colombian customs. Initial attempts to speak on the phone are hindered by my non-existent Spanish, and even an attempt to spell out my email address is fraught with the challenges of differing vowel pronunciations. I fear we may have to resign ourselves to being the stingy delegation at this competition…

I take advantage of a relatively free afternoon to sample the resort’s various pools and catch up on what’s been happening in the cricket. Our own version of the Ashes is taking place tomorrow, so hopefully the demolition happening at Lord’s is a good omen. Geoff and his brother are attempting to get the hashtag #otherashes trending. So far we have one tweet (by me) and a mention in the Guardian cricket feed. From tiny acorns…

Saturday 20th July

And so to the final practice exam of this pre-IMO camp, the Mathematical Ashes. I was a student in 2008 for the inaugural competition, the only time the UK has lost, and so in keeping with the cricket tradition the ceremonial funeral urn is filled with the ashes of UK mathematics, including a geometry question in my handwriting. (In fact, the pyre formed during an excursion after the IMO in Madrid got a bit out hand, and so it probably contains a comparable amount of Australian material.)

As for the other exams, we are using questions from last year’s IMO shortlist, that is, problems that were considered for inclusion by the jury, but not selected. The first two chosen are at the easier end of the IMO difficulty spectrum, while the third is really very awkward indeed. Post-exam, the teams compare notes and it seems that it will be tight, so Ivan and I divide up the questions, devise brief mark schemes and get going. Three hours later we feel happy with our conclusion: UNK 82, AUS 81. In reality, by far the most pleasing aspect is that both teams have demolished the two easier questions with such aplomb. This bodes very well for the IMO itself next week.

A wager is placed that less than 10 minutes will elapse between emailing Joseph Myers, custodian of the IMO Register and the BMOS website, and the results appearing on the latter. The placer of this wager turns out to be rather wise. We await a flood of hits on the OtherAshes blog. Meanwhile, we pay our final visit to the Santorini resort restaurant, who have accommodated our various dietary specifications and comical Spanish with elan. I order at random from the fish and seafood section and end up with a steak topped with guacamole. Definitely not complaining. Everyone heads back feeling understandably excited for the start of the main event tomorrow.

IMO 2013 – Part One: Travel and Training

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Preamble

Six years ago in Rhodes, Tom Lovering and I started what has now become a strong tradition of preparing an unofficial report about maths competitions from the student perspective. It seems appropriate to attempt to continue this in my new role as the Deputy Leader of this year’s UK team at the IMO. And since I have excellent wifi and a (just about) active maths blog, there seems no reason not to do this in real time, at least to a first approximation. I’m sure fans all around the world will be glued to their screens.

I should briefly explain what the IMO is. The acronym stands for International Mathematical Olympiad, and it is a competition held every year in July, welcoming school students from over 100 countries. Tempting though it is to picture a drawn-out global version of the ‘mathletics’ scene at the end of Mean Girls, the reality is somewhat different. Each country sends six students, who sit two 4.5 hour exams, each with three questions, in roughly increasing order of difficulty. It does however remain the case that you get jackets if you make the finals, admittedly with polyester rather than leather sleeves. Medals are awarded to roughly half of the participants.

Each team has a leader, who arrives early to help set the paper, and also assesses their team’s scripts, presenting their marks for approval by a board of co-ordinators supplied by the host country. Each team also has a deputy leader, who stays with the team initially, then joins the leader for this marking process.

As well as the competitive side, the olympiad is a great opportunity to meet other young mathematicians from all around the world. Certainly I am still in touch with many of the people I met when I was lucky enough to compete in Vietnam and Madrid (2007, 2008 respectively). As the competition moves country every year, it’s also a great chance to see some exciting places. This year it is in Santa Marta on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, after Buenos Aires in 2012.

Anyway, on with the report.

Sunday 14th July

I spend the morning packing up my room as I am moving to a new flat pretty much directly after this trip. Everything seems a lot clearer after sorting out the IMO team uniform which has arrived just in time leaving my floor essentially invisible under a sea of boxes. The mini-crisis wherein they were all delivered without my knowledge to the Worcester College kitchens seems but a distant memory…

We are flying at a painfully early hour tomorrow morning, so it makes sense to spend the night at an airport hotel. Courtesy of the satnav, I learn the hard way that there are three Holiday Inns at Heathrow. Geoff, Bev and I are the first to arrive, and wait for the students, two of whom are arriving directly from Copenhagen, bearing prizes and stories from the analogous physics competition just finished there. Parents are reassured that the occasional email and postcard will be sent and we retire in preparation for tomorrow’s Odyssey.

Monday 15th July

Up at 4.30am for the first leg over to Madrid. With time for little other than a quick espresso, straight onto the transatlantic flight to Bogota. The ten hours afford plenty of time to catch up on reading some papers. Had a think about how these results about (uniform) random forests might affect our thoughts about frozen percolation, and took advantage of the increasing tedium to do a long rate function calculation I’d been putting off for ages. I think the answer is \frac{1}{2}(1-\frac{1}{\lambda}) – the question is somewhat more interesting…

Also relish the chance to spend several hours diving into Love in the Time of Cholera, having figured that this was almost certainly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore a Colombian novelist while in Colombia. So far, so good. In particular, much more interesting than One Hundred Years of Solitude, or perhaps my tastes have changed in the past few years?

We learn courtesy of Iberia that tuna, peach and olives do not make a good sandwich combination, and wonder whether they will be able to resist the temptation to follow every announcement with a synthesised rendition of the Concierto de Aranjuez. A slight delay changing at Bogota airport allows sufficient time for extra sushi and further progress through the example sheet solutions I’ve offered to \LaTeX before the short hop north to Santa Marta. Gabriel’s cynicism about the fate of our luggage turns out to be unfounded, but the two panama hats packed in my suitcase have not enjoyed the trip at all. The Santorini Hotel seems ill-prepared for a group arrival at 10.30pm, but eventually we obtain keys and pay. Shortly afterwards, we are able to unpay one of the bills that they have charged us twice within the space of five minutes. With everyone very grateful for the violent air conditioning, we head for much overdue sleep.

Tuesday 16th July

Up at dawn from the jetlag, but a useful moment to sort out the details for the first practice exam. This pre-IMO camp is a joint venture with the Australian team, and both sets of students are sitting an IMO style exam each morning. The villa we are occupying is somewhat sort on table space, but the three UK students perched on the kitchen bar with their scripts claim that it is fine. If IMO 2008 is anything to go by, where the desks for the competition were so steeply sloped that pens became more valuable as paperweights than as writing equipment, this might be useful practice.

While the students are getting on with the festivities, Bev and I explore various local food options, I study a couple of papers and explore the beach, though the humidity is rather cloying in the middle of the day. The UK team make confident noises about the exam, so I hope that marking the Q2 geometry won’t be too traumatic. Some complicated diagram dependencies render this hope in vain, but we finish up in time for a quick debrief before dinner. Meanwhile, the team have learned the hard way that Colombian plumbing does not hugely appreciate toilet paper…

Wednesday 17th July

I would normally struggle rather badly to find the motivation to go for a 7am run, but with a mile or so of relatively quiet beach on offer, it suddenly becomes a much more attractive proposition. As I return to the Santorini resort, the first waves of peddlers are arriving. One or two make a token attempt to sell me sunglasses, and a nice lady asks me how I got a particularly purple bruise, though I figure my Spanish is not sufficient to explain the idea of cricket right now.

Geoff bids us farewell and heads off to join the other team leaders at a top-secret location where they will begin the process of setting the paper. In theory it’s top-secret; in practice, it must be Barranquilla, the next city down the coast. The students power through another exam all morning, and pleasingly resist the temptation to make anything too complicated, so marking everything is relatively straightforward. Our stroll to dinner is accompanied by a small posse of feral dogs. I am reminded of the health guidance for this part of the world: “rabies is relatively low-risk, except for children, who are more likely to allow themselves to be licked in the face.”

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