Tag Archives: Philippines

IMO 2016 Diary – Part Two

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Wednesday 6th July

After starting the third exam, Mike, Jo and I go for a walk through some of the smaller villages on the other side of the ridge. Along the way, we pick up a bunch of local rascals who ask us, via their English-speaking henchman, many questions about basketball, and the colour of Mike’s shoes. Jo asks him why they aren’t in school, but this remains shrouded in mystery. Partly as a means of escape, we take a detour through a grove of the famous Tagaytay pineapples, which are indeed a striking crimson just before they ripen fully. I’m nervous about beard tanlines so am looking for a barber, but it seems I’m one of only two people in the Philippines with facial hair. (The other is Neel, who is adamant that his school approves of the ‘Wild man of Borneo’ look.)

We return to find that the students have been issued with cake. Its icing is impossible to manage without a fork. It is also entirely purple, and Lawrence describes it as ‘tasting of air’. None of this has distracted the UK students, who all solve the first two problems perfectly, which bodes well for the IMO itself, now less than a week away. To fill some time and provide a brief variation from the constant problem-solving, I give a talk about correlation and graphs, based on a subsubsubsection of my thesis and for now, fortunately no-one finds any logical holes.

Thursday 7th July

To add variety, today the two teams have set each other a paper, which they will spend the afternoon marking. It transpired late last night that the hotel has no means of printing or photocopying documents, and we haven’t brought copies of tomorrow’s final exam. So today’s paper has been painstakingly written on whiteboards, and some of the adults set off round Tagaytay in search of a working printer. The mode of transport is the ‘tricycle’, a small motorcycle with one place behind the rider and two in a bone-shaking pillion enclosed within a lace curtain. Availability of tricycles is infinite, availability of photocopiers is positive but small, and availability of printers is zero. We’ll be going for the handwritten, personal touch.

Both teams have chosen their papers so as to get some fiddly answers, and both teams have helped the exercise by writing some rubbish. Mostly it is all correct on close inspection, but much requires serious digestion, and gives the students at least a flavour of what Andrew and I have to endure on a daily basis. The Australians have rephrased a combinatorial problem in terms of Neel wandering through security checks at an airport, and the UK boys have proved that whatever happens here, a gold medal at the International Metaphor-Extending Olympiad seems inevitable.

Courtesy of Australian student Wilson, a penchant for fedoras has swept through the camp. Joe and Harvey look like extras in an ultra-budget production of Bugsy Malone. Our mock coordination has taken most of the afternoon, so we have not been tracking the imminent supertyphoon Nepartak as carefully as we ought, but at least the new headwear fashion offers some protection from the elements.

Friday 8th July

This morning is the final training exam, and in keeping with tradition is designated the Mathematical Ashes. Whichever team wins gets to keep an impressive urn, filled with the charred remains of some old olympiad scripts. The urn is quite heavy, so for the Cathay Pacific weight restrictions, it would be convenient for me if Australia won this year. The lack of an actual Ashes this year renders the competition all the more important in some people’s eyes, though if there were a test match here today, the covers would be on all day as the typhoon squalls.

The Ashes paper is the original Day Two paper [1] from IMO 2015. The problems are supposed to be secret until after this year’s IMO (exactly because of events like the one we are running) but the entire shortlist has been released overnight on the internet. Fortunately none of the students have been checking the relevant forum over breakfast, but ideally people will curb their admirable enthusiasm and follow the actual rules in future years. I mark the second problem, a fiddly recursive inequality, which invites many approaches, including calculus of varying rigour. Whatever the outcome, both teams have done a good job here.

For dinner, we are hosted by Dr Simon Chua, and some of his colleagues involved in the Philippines maths enrichment community, who suggested this location, and helped us set up this camp. We are treated to various Philippine dishes, including suckling pig and squid in its own ink, with a view of sunset across the lake as the storm clears. We’re very grateful to Simon, Joseph and their colleagues for tonight and their help and advice in advance.

We finish the marking after dinner, and the UK has consolidated our position on the third question, including a superb 21/21 for Warren on a genuinely hard paper, and we have won 82-74. It is late, everyone is tired, and there is packing required, so the celebrations are slightly muted, though it gives Jacob an excellent opportunity to lose his room key again, an alternative competition in which he is certainly the unique gold medallist. We transfer to the main event in Hong Kong early tomorrow, so it’s an early night all round.

[1] – Potted summary: some copies of this paper were accidentally released before they should have been, and so the paper had to be re-set.

Saturday 9th July

After a disturbed night, it has been vociferously recommended that we leave at 6am to beat the Manila traffic, with the result that we have four hours at the airport. I try to remain stoic, with difficulty. Joe practises sleeping on every available surfaces while the rest of us have a sudden enthusiasm to solve N8 from last year’s shortlist. It turns out the UKMT travel agent has outdone themselves, and booked half the group in premium economy, and half in regular economy, though the only real difference seems to be armrest width.

We are met in HK by Allison, our local guide for the week, and escorted onto coaches across from the airport on Lantau island to the University of Science and Technology in the New Territories. The check-in process is comprehensive: I sign and initial to confirm that they have correctly provided us with seven laptop sleeves, and then repeat for an infinite supply of other branded goods. Finally, we are allowed out to explore the spectacular campus, which stretches steeply down to Clearwater Bay. It is a novelty to take elevators up a total of 37 floors, and arrive on something called ‘Ground Floor’.

After a confusingly-managed dinner at the student cafeteria, a few of us head out to look at the nearby neighbourhood of Hang Hau. We pass the olympic velodrome, which gives Lawrence a good opportunity to explain gearing to those among his colleagues who do not naturally seek out applied mathematics. We return to find that Harvey decided to go to sleep before working out how to turn on his air conditioning. In humid hindsight, this was a poor strategy, as this was one of HK’s hottest days since records began. We have arrived back at the perfect time to watch the awesome thunderstorm from dry safety, which hopefully isn’t an omen of terrible things to follow in the contest, which starts on Monday.

IMO 2016 Diary – Part One

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Friday 1st July

It’s my last morning as an Oxford resident, and I have to finish the final chapter of my thesis, move out of my flat, print twenty-four boarding passes, and hurtle round town collecting all the college and department stamps on my pre-submission form 3.03 like a Pokemon enthusiast. Getting to Heathrow in time for an early evening flight seems very relaxed by comparison, even with the requirement to transport two boxes of IMO uniform. Because I wasn’t paying very much attention when I signed off the order, this year we will be wearing ‘gold’, but ‘lurid yellow’ might be a better description. Hopefully the contestants might have acquired some genuinely gold items by the time we return to this airport in two weeks.

Saturday 2nd July

Our flight passes rapidly. I proved an unusual function was locally Lipschitz, watched a film, and slept for a while. Others did not sleep at all, though I suspect they also did not prove any functions were locally Lipschitz. The airport in Hong Kong is truly enormous; for once the signs advertising the time to allow to get to each gate have a tinge of accuracy. We have plenty of time though, and there is substantial enthusiasm for coffee as we transfer. Cathay Pacific approach me with a feedback form, which turns out to include 130 detailed questions, including one concerning the ‘grooming’ of the check-in staff, while we all collectively tackle an inequality from the students’ final sheet of preparatory problems.

Before long though, we have arrived in Manila, where Jacob is uncontrollably excited to receive a second stamp in his passport, to complement his first from Albania at the Balkan Olympiad last month. As we bypass the city, we get a clear view of the skyscrapers shrouded in smog across the bay, though the notorious Manila traffic is not in evidence today. We pass through the hill country of Luzon Island, the largest of the Philippines and get caught in a ferocious but brief rainstorm, and finally a weekend jam on the lakeside approach to Tagaytay, but despite these delays, the fiendish inequality remains unsolved. I’m dangerously awake, but most of the students look ready to keel over, so we find our rooms, then the controls for the air conditioning, then let them do just that.

Sunday 3rd July

We have a day to recover our poise, so we take advantage of morning, before the daily rain sets in, to explore the area. We’ve come to Tagaytay because it’s high and cool by Philippine standards, so more conducive to long sessions of mathematics than sweltering Manila. We follow the winding road down the ridge to the shore of Taal Lake, where a strange flotilla of boats is docked, each resembling something between a gondola and a catamaran, waiting to ferry us to Taal Volcano, which lies in the centre of the lake. The principal mode of ascent from the beach is on horseback, but first one has to navigate the thronging hordes of vendors. Lawrence repeatedly and politely says no, but nonetheless ends up acquiring cowboy hats for all the students for about the price of a croissant in Oxford.

Many of us opt to make the final climb to the crater rim on foot, which means we can see the sulphurous volcanic steam rising through the ground beside the trail. From the lip we can see the bright green lake which lies in the middle of the volcano, which is itself in the middle of this lake in the middle of Luzon island. To the excitement of everyone who likes fractals, it turns out there is a further island within the crater lake, but we do not investigate whether this nesting property can be extended further. After returning across the outer lake, we enjoy the uphill journey back to Tagaytay as it includes a detour for a huge platter of squid, though the van’s clutch seems less thrilled. Either way, we end up with a dramatic view of an electrical storm, before our return to the hotel to await the arrival of the Australians.

Monday 4th July

Morning brings the opportunity to meet properly the Australian team and their leaders Andrew, Mike and Jo. We’ve gathered in the Philippines to talk about maths, and sit some practice exams recreating the style of the IMO. The first of these takes place this morning, in which the students have 4.5 hours to address three problems, drawn from those shortlisted but unused for last year’s competition.

After fielding a couple of queries, I go for a walk with Jo to the village halfway down the ridge. On the way down, the locals’ glances suggest they think we are eccentric, while on the ascent they think we are insane. About one in every three vehicles is a ‘jeepney’, which is constructed by taking a jeep, extending it horizontally to include a pair of benches in the back, covering with chrome cladding, and accessorising the entire surface in the style of an American diner. We return to find that the hotel thinks they are obliged to provide a mid-exam ‘snack’, and today’s instalment is pasta in a cream sauce with salad, served in individual portions under cloches. Andrew and I try to suggest some more appropriate options, but we’re unsure that the message has got across.

I spend the afternoon marking, and the UK have started well, with reliable geometry (it appears to be an extra axiom of Euclid that all geometry problems proposed in 2015/2016 must include a parallelogram…) and a couple of solutions to the challenging number theory problem N6, including another 21/21 for Joe. Part of the goal of this training camp is to learn or revise key strategies for writing up solutions in an intelligible fashion. At the IMO, the students’ work will be read by coordinators who have to study many scripts in many languages, and so clear logical structure and presentation is a massive advantage. The discussion of the relative merits of claims and lemmas continues over dinner, where Warren struggles to convince his teammates of the virtues of bone marrow, a by-product of the regional speciality, bulalo soup.

Tuesday 5th July

The second exam happens, and further odd food appears. Problem two encourages solutions through the medium of the essay, which can prove dangerous to those who prefer writing to thinking. In particular, the patented ‘Agatha Christie strategy’ of explaining everything only right at the end is less thrilling in the realm of mathematics. It’s a long afternoon.

We organise a brief trip to the People’s Park in the Sky, based around Imelda Marcos’s abandoned mansion which sits at the apex of the ridge. In the canon of questionable olympiad excursions, this was right up there. There was no sign of the famous shoe collection. Indeed the former ‘palace’ was open to the elements, so the style was rather more derelicte than chic, perfect for completing your I-Spy book of lichen, rust and broken spiral staircases. Furthermore after a brief storm, the clouds have descended, so the view is reminiscent of our first attempt at Table Mountain in 2014, namely about five metres visibility. A drugged parrot flaps miserably through the gloom. Even the UK team shirts are dimmed.

There is a shrine on the far side of the palace, housing a piece of rock which apparently refused to be dynamited during the construction process, and whose residual scorchmarks resemble the Blessed Virgin Mary. A suggested prayer is written in Tagalog (and indeed in Comic Sans) but there is a man sitting on the crucial rock, and it’s not clear whether one has to pay him to move to expose the vision. Eventually it clears enough to get a tolerable set of team photos. Joe tries to increase the compositional possibilities by standing on a boulder, thus becoming ten times taller than the volcano, so we keep things coplanar for now. Harvey finds a giant stone pineapple inside whose hollow interior a large number of amorous messages have been penned. He adds

\mathrm{Geoff }\heartsuit\,\triangle \mathrm{s}

in homage to our leader, who has just arrived in Hong Kong to begin the process of setting this year’s IMO papers.