22nd International Mathematics Competition for University Students

Radostin Simitev accompanied Ciaran O'Neill, Eamon Quinlan, Ivaylo Valkov and Lavinia Bulai, students from the School, to represent the University of Glasgow at the 22nd International Mathematics Competition for University Students http://www.imc-math.org.uk.

Our team ranked in 56th place just below Yale and Universitat de Valencia in a competition with 330 students from 73 teams representing different universities or nations from across the globe. The 2015 IMC took place from 27 July to 2 Aug 2015 at the American University in Bulgaria in the 40C scorching heat of the southern Bulgarian city of Blagoevgrad. Over two "competition" days the young mathematicians worked to solve 10 difficult problems from the fields of Real and Complex Analysis, Algebra, Geometry and Combinatorics. The problems were selected out of over 60 original questions posed by a 50-strong international Jury of practising mathematicians. The winners from St Petersburg State University and other top scoring teams had extensive experience of preparing and participating in mathematical olympiads including a long tradition of taking part in the IMC, in some cases since its very inception back in 1993. Against this backdrop our team achieved a very respectable result and made many mathematical friends. In addition, our team which took part in the Competition for a very first time gained valuable experience and insight that could help achieve a step increase in results in subsequent competitions.

Congratulations everyone and well done for the team effort!

PhD student Craig Alexander attended the RSC conference in Leeds in August of this year to present his research on the analysis of linguistic behaviour in Glaswegian dialect. Craig won 2nd place for the best talk at the conference, and has been invited to speak at the RSS conference in Exeter in September.

University Challenge

Andy Baker’s summer project student and current mathematics undergraduate student Vitalijs Brejevs appeared on University Challenge. Vitalijs, from Riga, Latvia, has been quizzing competitively for some time, but this was his first experience doing so in English. There's also another Maths student on the team, Oliver Allen, who'll be starting his 3rd year. The team captain, Eihblin McMenamin, is doing Geography and is on an exchange program in New Zealand for the next year, and the fourth team member, Andrew Davidson is studying Medicine.

Individually, they have been selected to represent the university based on written test scores and then an interview. Then they completed another written test as a team and were invited for a final selection test/interview in Edinburgh (about 130 other teams made it to this stage). Finally, 28 teams made it to the televised stage of the competition.

You can see the outcome for yourself via the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HQnByC_N7Q&feature=youtu.be

First published: 5 October 2015

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