Nikita Poljakov, Laura Pozzetti, Nikolaos Dimitrakopoulos, and Xianghe Zhu have been training with former IMO/IMC medalists and passed their second selection exam at the end of June. This exam included an original problem posed by Fatemeh Mahammadi, pure mathematics lecturer and team leader.
The final competition spans two days and will include problems from the fields of algebra, analysis, geometry and combinatorics. This year it takes place in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria from the 28 July to the 3 August.
Nikita said: “Preparing for the competition was so exciting. The workshops were insightful and teaching sessions introduced useful methods, such as Vandermonde determinant, probabilistic method, Combinatorial Nullstellensatz, pigeonhole principle, and density of the sets.
“I would like to thank Harry, Joseph and Fatemeh for creating such a welcoming atmosphere during the sessions The problems at the last contest were quite hard but beautiful.”
Laura added: “I really enjoyed attending the preliminary workshops and I am thrilled that I have been selected to represent Bristol at the IMC. I will work hard and practice on past papers as much as possible. I am grateful for this opportunity and really want to do well.”
Xianghe said: “I’m honored to be a member of Bristol IMC team. It is a great challenge for me, with interesting topics and questions – I can push myself to improve my skills. The workshops were really helpful and out tutors were very patient. They gave us advice on how to prepare for the competition. Every member of the team is very friendly and enthusiastic and I enjoyed exchanging ideas with them.”
And Nikolaos said: “When you can keep doing your hobby in university, that’s exciting. That’s why I did everything I could to be a part of the representative team for the IMC.
“The whole process was amazing - we faced many challenging problems and were given help and motivation to be able to solve them. I strongly recommend everyone who enjoys solving problems in their free time to try to be a part of the IMC representative team. It’s something very special and we are lucky to be given the chance to do it.''