China tops math Olympiad, with SA 64th

IF it takes you longer than two seconds to work out what 156 and 78 add up to, then chances are you are not qualified to even serve soft drinks to the whizz kids who took part in the International Mathematics Olympiad in Cape Town this week.

A total of 560 teenagers from 101 countries put their brains into overdrive at the Olympiad, in which they were required to solve mind-bending equations such as: “For each positive integer n, the Bank of Cape Town issues coins of denomination 1/n. Given a finite collection of such coins (of not necessarily different denominations) with total value at most 99 + ½, prove that it is possible to split this collection into 100 or fewer groups, such that each group has total value at most 1.”

Yesterday, South Africa was awarded 64th spot in the contest. Cape Town matric pupil Robin Visser was first in the six-person local team.

The Olympiad, held at the University of Cape Town, had pupils vying for the maximum score of 42 points by answering six tough maths problems over two days.

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the Olympiad, which takes place in a different country each year.

A total of 295 medals were awarded this year.

Olympiad spokeswoman Marisa Louw said Visser, a pupil at St George’s Grammar School, received a bronze medal for scoring 20 points.

Top individual honours went to Alexander Grunning from Aus- tralia, Jiyang Gao from the People’s Republic of China and Po-Sheng Wu from Taiwan, who all scored 100% in the test.

The top-ranking countries were China, the US, Taiwan, Russia and Japan.

“It was a great privilege to be able to represent the country at what is considered by many to be the world’s hardest math Olympiad for high school students,” said Visser. “It is something which I’m grateful for and which I can only attribute to hard work, perseverance and determination.”