Pi says she feels she might help change attitudes by attending the camp. “Maybe some guys don’t realize there are girls who are good at math,” she says, adding that she might help change people's minds by answering problems in class. Supreet Randhawa, an outreach administrator in the department of mathematics, says the camp makes an effort to recruit more girls, recognizing the need to boost their numbers in math as in other STEM fields. “Also the feeling you get when you finish a problem,” she added. “You feel good for taking the time to solve it.” Orelia Pi from Toronto (pictured left), who is going into Grade 10, says she was drawn to math because “it’s kind of like a puzzle.” Whether or not they're able to match Song’s success, many of the 26 mathletes at U of T's camp say they enjoy meeting like-minded students from across the country and solving mind-boggling problems together. Tsimerman coached Olympiad hall-of-famer Alex Song, the Waterloo, Ont.-native who achieved a perfect score in 2015. “The IMO is the apex of competitive mathematics at the high school level,” he adds in a release, “and our students have represented our country incredibly well.”
Jacob Tsimerman, a U of T associate professor in the math department, says he was “incredibly proud of our team’s brilliant performance.” Canada finished 24 th of 112 countries in this year’s Olympiad, held in Bath, England earlier this July. With a little luck and plenty of work, the mathletes may be able to secure a place at the international Olympiad and compete against high school students from around the globe. The contest exposes students to more advanced problem-solving, requiring proofs and detailed analysis – challenges they might not encounter until later in their education, he adds. But if you don’t, you might struggle for a long time.” “There’s often a key thing to note and if you get it, you can write a short pretty solution. “Sometimes they can be very hard and sometimes you have an insight and then they’re fast,” Wolske says. The national Olympiad includes just five questions, ranging in difficulty. Those who do well earn a ticket to the world championships, the International Math Olympiad, which is hosted in a different city each year. “It’s the highest-level high school math contest in Canada,” Wolske says. The top 50 students who write the Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge, and another few dozen who write a different qualifying exam, are eligible to compete in the Canadian Math Olympiad, the equivalent of nationals for high school math students.
I have solved a bunch of these problems and seen solutions to them and then they still have new ones.” “The students are very clever,” Wolske says, in between scribbling geometry problems on a blackboard at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology.
Post-doctoral researcher Zack Wolske writes problems on the blackboard at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)īut the teenagers often surpass their teacher’s expectations. Some of the questions are so difficult, Wolske says, they could stump some of his first-year university students. Wolske, a post-doctoral researcher in the department of mathematics, is coaching the students during the week-long camp, helping them solve problems like those they might face on exam day. Back at their high schools, most of the students are far ahead of their peers, Wolske adds. “They’re probably bored.” Many of the students chosen to attend U of T’s camp have shown their math mettle by scoring high on past exams, their instructor Zack Wolske says. The Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge in November, which is open to all high school students interested in math, is the first step toward harder and more selective national and international contests. The students aren't breaking a sweat, but make no mistake: They are training hard.Ībout two dozen of the country's top mathletes in Grades 8 to 10 have come to the University of Toronto this week to hone their abilities ahead of national math Olympiads starting this fall. If there were a Rocky-style training montage for the University of Toronto's math camp, it might involve blackboard problems in circle geometry, inequalities and modular arithmetic.
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