Notices of the AMS
October 1995
U.S. Places Eleventh in International Olympiad
The U.S. team for the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), held
in July in Toronto, placed eleventh out of a record number of 74
competing teams. Each of the six members of the U.S. team received a
medal. The top twelve teams, in order, were China, Romania, Russia,
Vietnam, Hungary, Bulgaria, South Korea, Iran, Japan, United Kingdom,
U.S., and India.
Aleksandr L. Khazanov of Brooklyn, New York, Jacob A.
Lurie of Bethesda, Maryland, and Josh P.
Nichols-Barrer of Newton Center, Massachusetts, received silver medals. Khazanov
and
Lurie were members of last year's IMO team, which achieved a perfect
score for the first time in IMO history. Receiving bronze medals were Christopher
Chang of Palo Alto, California, Jay H.
Chyung of Iowa City, Iowa, and Andrei C. Gnepp of Orange, Ohio.
Titu Andreescu of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy was the
team leader. ``Even though our team ranked eleventh this year, all of
our students and coaches did their best,'' he said. ``We participated
with a young and promising team of six Americans who gave everything
they were capable of and were representatives of our country. I am
proud of them all.'' The team was also accompanied by Paul Zeitz of
the University of San Francisco and Walter E. Mientka of the
University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
The IMO team members participated in a preparatory training session
this summer and were selected from a larger group of top performers on
the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO). The USAMO is sponsored by
nine national associations in the mathematical sciences, the AMS among
them. Arrangements are provided by the Mathematical Association of
America.
Here is a representative question from the 1995 IMO. Let $p$ be a prime number.
Find the number of subsets $A$ of the set ${1,2,...,2p}$ such that: (1) $A$ has
exactly $p$ elements, and (2) the sum of all the elements in $A$ is divisible by
$p$.
--Joint Policy Board for Mathematics News Release
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