{"id":113,"date":"2017-10-19T09:28:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T09:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/?p=113"},"modified":"2017-10-19T09:28:03","modified_gmt":"2017-10-19T09:28:03","slug":"simon-marais-problem-competition-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/simon-marais-problem-competition-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Simon Marais Problem Competition 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, there was the inaugural Simon Marais Mathematics Competition<\/a>, a new maths competition for undergraduate students living in the time zones between New Zealand and India inclusive.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Problem A4 is expected to be very hard and has an interesting solution which I found and wrote up here<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maths"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7V6a7-1P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petermc.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}