This short blog records the UK team at the Balkan Mathematical Olympiad 2016, held in Albania. The first part is here. A more mathematical version of this report, with commentaries on the problems, will appear at the weekend.
Sunday 8th May
Gerry and I are separated by 15km, so we can’t work together until this morning, when I also get a chance to see the UK team at their base in Vore, before they are whisked off to a beach. We now have the chance to work on the geometry together, which includes two sensible trigonometric arguments, and a nice synthetic proof only with reference to an inverted diagram. We quickly decide that this isn’t a major error, and aim to schedule our meetings as quickly as possible.
The coordinators for questions 3 and 4 seem very relaxed, and we quickly get exactly what we deserve, plus a spurious extra point for Michael because he used the phrase ‘taxicab metric’ in his rough. Thomas’s trigonometry, especially its bold claim that ‘by geometry, there are no other solutions’ when an expression becomes non-invertible, seems not to have been read entirely critically. Michael’s inverted diagram is briefly a point of controversy, but we are able to get 9 rather than the 7 which was proposed, absurdly for an argument that was elegant and entirely valid in the correct diagram up to directed angles. Question 1 is again rapid, as the coordinators say that the standard of writing is so clear that they are happy to ignore two small omissions. It transpires after discussion with, among others, the Italian leader, that such generosity may have been extended to some totally incorrect solutions, but in the final analysis, everything was fair.
So we are all sorted around 11.30am with a team score of 152, a new high for the UK at this competition. This is not necessarily a meaningful or consistent metric, but with scores of {20,21,22,29,30,30} everyone has solved at least two problems, and the three marks lost were more a matter of luck than sloppiness. Irrespective of the colours of medals this generates, Gerry and I are very pleased. We find a table in the sun, and I return to my introduction while we await progress from the other countries’ coordinations, and our students’ return.
This does not happen rapidly, so I climb the hill behind the hotel up a narrow track. A small boy is standing around selling various animals. Apparently one buys rabbits by the bucket and puppies by the barrel in Albania. Many chickens cross the road, but key questions remain unanswered. From the summit, there is a panorama across the whole Tirana area, and the ring of mountains encircling us. One can also see flocks of swifts, which are very similar to swallows, only about twice as large, and their presence in any volume makes no comment on the arrival of the British summer.
The students return mid-afternoon, and are pleased with their scores. Jamie explains their protracted misadventure with a camp bed in their ‘suite’ of rooms, and Jacob shows off his recent acquisitions: a felt hat, and a t-shirt outlining the border of a ‘greater Albania’. The fact that they didn’t have his size seems not to have been a deterrent, but hopefully the snug fit will discourage him from sporting it in Montenegro, which might lead to a political incident.
Hours pass and time starts to hang heavily as dinner approaches, with no sign of the concluding jury meeting. Finally, we convene at 10pm to decide the boundaries. The chair of the jury reads the regulations, and implements them literally. There’s a clump of contestants with three full solutions, so the boundaries are unusually compressed at 17, 30 and 32. A shame for Thomas on 29, but these things happen, and three full solutions minus a treatment of the constant case for a polynomial is still something to be happy about. Overall, 4 bronze and 2 silvers is a pleasing UK spread, and only the second time we have earned a full set of medals at this competition. The leaders are rushed back to Tirana, but hopefully the teams have enough energy left for celebration!
Monday 9th May
Today is the tutti excursion, but on the way the leaders stop at the city hall to meet the mayor of Tirana. He is new to the office, reminiscent of a young Marlon Brando, and has a bone-crushing handshake. He improvises an eloquent address, and negotiates with flair the awkward silence which follows when the floor is opened for speeches in response. In the end, the Saudi leader and I both say some words of thanks on behalf of the guest nations, and soon we are back on our way south towards Greece. The Albanian motorway is smooth and modern, but we find ourselves competing for space with communist-era windowless buses and the occasional pedestrian leading by hand a single cow.
Our destination is Berat, known as the city of a thousand windows, and home to a hilltop castle complex from which none of the thousand windows are visible. The old orthodox cathedral is now a museum of icons and other religious art, and we get a remarkably interesting tour from a local guide. The highlight is a mosaic representation of the Julian calendar, and we discuss whether the symmetries built into the construction would be more conducive to a geometry or a combinatorics question.
Back in Tirana, we reconverge at the closing ceremony, held in the theatre at a local university for the arts. While we wait, there is a photo montage, featuring every possible Powerpoint transition effect, in which Jacob and his non-standard hat usage makes a cameo appearance. We are then treated to a speech by Joszef Pelikan, who wows the crowd by switching effortlessly into Albanian, and some highly accomplished dancing, featuring both classical ballet and traditional local styles.
The ministry have taken over some aspects of the organisation here, and there is mild chaos when it’s medal time. The leaders are called upon to dispense the prizes, though the UK is snubbed for alphabetic reasons. The end result is that forty students are on stage with neither medals nor any instructions to leave. Eventually it vaguely resolves, though it is a shame there is no recognition for the two contestants (from Serbia and Romania) who solved the final problem and thus achieved a hugely impressive perfect score.
As you can see, the UK team look extremely pleased with themselves, and Michael’s strategy to get to know all the other teams through the medium of the selfie is a storming success. A very large number of photographs are taken, and Thomas is not hiding in at least one of them. The closing dinner is back in Vore, which is very convivial and involves many stuffed vine leaves. Rosie suggests we retire somewhere quieter, but by the time we establish how to leave, she has instead dragged the rest of the team onto the dancefloor, where near-universal ignorance of the step pattern is no obstacle to enjoying the folk music. The DJ slowly transitions towards the more typical Year 11 disco playlist, and Jill feels ‘Hips don’t lie’ is a cue for the adults to leave.
Tuesday 10th May
Our flight leaves at 9pm so we have many hours to fill. It turns out that we have one of the shortest journeys. The Serbians have caught a bus at 3am, while the Cypriots are facing stopovers in Vienna and Paris! It is another beautiful day, so we hire a small van to take us to Lezhe, the hometown of our guide Sebastian, and the nearby beach at Shengjin.
We walk to the tip of the breakwater, and watch some fishermen hard at work, though apparently today is a lean catch. The buildings along the beachfront are a sequence of pastel colours, backing onto another sheer mountain, and we could easily be in Liguria. Jamie is revising for his A2-level physics and chemistry exams, which start at 9am tomorrow morning, and the rest of the team are trying to complete the shortlist of problems from IMO 2007. They progress through the questions in the sand, with a brief diversion as Jacob catches a crab in the shallows with his bare hands for no apparent reason.
After a fish-heavy lunch, we return to Vore, and I’ve run out of subsubsections to amend, so propose another walk into the hills. The animals we meet this time appear not to be for sale. Some scrabbling in the undergrowth is sadly not the longed-for bear or wolf. Many of its colleagues are loitering on the local saddle point, and our Albanian companion Elvis describes them as ‘sons of sheep’, while Renzhi confidently identifies them as cows. They are goats. There is a small but vigorous goatdog, who reacts with extreme displeasure to our attempt to climb to one viewpoint, so Gerry leads us off in another direction up the local version of the north face of the Eiger. We do emerge on the other side, dustier but with plenty of heavily silhouetted photographs.
Then the hour of departure, and time to say goodbye to the organisers, especially Adrian, Matilda and Enkel who have made everything happen, and in a wonderful spirit; and our guide Sebastian, who has set an impossibly high bar for any others to aspire to. We wish him well in his own exams, which start on Thursday! Albania has left a strong positive impression, and it will sit high on my list of places to explore more in the future, hopefully before too many others discover it. The airport affords the chance to spend the final Leke on brandy and figurines of Mother Teresa, and the flight the chance to finish problem N5, and discuss our geometry training regime with Rosie and Jacob as they work through some areal exercises.
2am is not a thrilling time to be arriving in Oxford, and 2.30am is not a thrilling time to be picking up solutions to past papers (and an even less thrilling time to discover that no such solutions have been handed in). But this has been a really enjoyable competition, at which the UK team were delightful company, and performed both strongly and stylishly at the competition, so it is all more than justified. We meet again at half-term in three weeks’ time to select the UK team for the IMO in Hong Kong, and hopefully explore some more interesting mathematics!
Eventually Almost Everywhere 