Posted Friday 18 July 2008

Australia has taken the Mathematics Ashes (see story below) for competition at mathematics between Australian and United Kingdom High School students.

Teams of both countries were training together in Lisbon before the International Mathematical Olympiad being held this week in Madrid. Their final training exam was the official one for the new competition to be conducted annually. Later this week the United Kingdom scripts will be burned and permanently sealed in a funeral urn to be held by the winning team.

In the spirit of their cricket counterparts, this was an even team performance, with all students solving problem 1 and a number solving problem 2. Sampson Wong continued his form with geometry, solving problem 3. Sampson has now solved all geometry problems set in training this year, including all shortlisted geometry problems from the 2007 International Mathematical Olympiad.

The Australian win was relatively comfortable, with a final score of 72 points as against 55 scored by the United Kingdom.

Australian scores were:

Posted Sunday 15 June 2008

An urn has been donated for the purpose of being a perpetual trophy in mathematics competitions between Australia and the United Kingdom.

The Australian and United Kingdom Mathematics Trusts have combined on a number of projects in recent years, in cross-promoting publications and in producing the international journal Mathematics Competitions and last year the two countries' International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) teams trained together in Sydney before participating in the IMO in Vietnam.

This year the two teams will train together in Lisbon before participating in the IMO in Madrid, between 10 and 22 July. Australian Mathematics Trust Executive Director Peter Taylor has donated the urn for perpetual competition, the first of which will be held on the final day of the training camp in Lisbon.

The urn is a genuine 6.5in funeral urn purchased from a funeral parlour in Canberra. At a ceremony in Madrid the scripts of the losing team will be burned and the ashes sealed permanently inside the urn. The urn will be retained by the winning team.

At a function in Melbourne on Friday 13 June Taylor presented the urn to Australian Team Leader Dr Angelo Di Pasquale (above) for taking to Lisbon.

The aim is for the teams to train together before IMOs where feasible, and compete for the Mathematics Ashes on the last day. In years when this is not feasible the Ashes will be decided by the Australian and United Kingdom team scores at the IMO itself.

Taylor has also donated a cup, which will be retained by the Team Leader of the winning team between competitions.

The IMO has a history dating back to 1959, when it was first held in Romania. In fact for many years the event was substantially the domain of the Eastern European Socialist bloc. Despite this United Kingdom entered from quite an early time, participating in fact from 1967. During this time until 1981, when Australia first entered, the event remained relatively small, but United Kingdom was very successful, having a number of top 5 positions, coming 2nd in fact in 1977.

After 1981, when there were still just 27 countries, the event grew to 49 countries when Australia hosted the event in 1988. After the emergence of many new countries in the early 1990s, and the entry of most Latin American countries since Argentina hosted in 1997, the event has changed some character and grown to a record 93 countries in 2007.

United Kingdom would have easily retained the Ashes throughout the 1980s but since then there has been more of a contest, as the table below shows. Australia would have won for the first time in 1993, and then all years from 1997 (when Australia recorded its only top 10 placing) until 2002.

Winning country in blue, country followed by points and placing. Note that a student's score has always been out of a total of 42 (6 problems each worth 7 points) there were 8 to a team until 1981, 4 in 1982 and 6 per team since 1983.