A couple of weeks ago, there was the inaugural Simon Marais Mathematics Competition, a new maths competition for undergraduate students living in the time zones between New Zealand and India inclusive.
The students’ scripts have not yet been marked. As a member of the problem committee, I will be especially interested to see how they did. The questions and solutions can be found on the Simon Marais website. There will be a greater variety of solutions posted some time in November after the scripts have been marked. I will currently permit myself a few brief comments on the problems.
I actually came up with B1, which surprised me! The idea here was to specifically come up with an easy problem. One day I was leafing through some old Olympiad material, and on a sheet of preparatory problems for a maths camp from when I was a student, I saw a problem about classifying configurations of 4 points in the plane such that the sum of the distances from each point to the other points was the same. I wondered to myself what happened in three dimensions and the problem was born.
Problem A4 is expected to be very hard and has an interesting solution which I found and wrote up here. This is similar to an approach to the fundamental theorem of algebra which I believe goes back to Gauss and which I may discuss here if I have time.
As a member of the problem committee, I am always looking out for problem submissions for future competitions and welcome anybody who has what they think might be a suitable problem to submit it (which can be directly to me, or the chair of the committee, via email).