In this paper we describe the network infrastructure we designed, built and operated for the International Mathematics Olympiad in the Netherlands in 2011. The infrastructure was pragmatically designed around OpenVPN tunnels in a star topology between the various venues. VLANs were extensively used to separate functional groups and networks. The actual construction of the event network took abo...

Lagrange multipliers offer a way to find the extrema of an objective function f(x1, x2, . . . , xn) subject to a constraint function g(x1, x2, . . . , xn) = 0; for example, we may wish to maximize a+ b+ c subject to a2 + b2 + c2 = 1. However, there are lots of tiny details that need to be checked in order to completely solve a problem with Lagrange multipliers. On an olympiad the use of Lagrang...

What is it that we want to achieve with our Linguistic Olympiads and how do the contests vary in different countries? The Swedish Olympiad has been running for 7 years now and is primarily focused on public outreach spreading linguistics to secondary school students. The contest involves not only a test but also lectures, school visits and teaching material. The effort is put on promoting the i...

Hex is a beautiful game with simple rules and a strategic complexity comparable to that of Chess and Go. The massive game-tree search techniques developed mostly for Chess and successfully used for Checkers and a number of other games, become less useful for games with large branching factors like Hex and Go. In this paper, we describe deduction rules, which are used to calculate values of comp...

The procedures studied in this paper originate from a problem posed at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1986. We present several approaches to the IMO problem and its generalizations. In this context we introduce a “signed mean value procedure” and study “relaxation procedures on graphs”. We prove that these processes are always finite, thus confirming a conjecture of Akiyama, Hosono ...

This ‘Russian Cards’ problem originated at the Moscow Math Olympiad 2000. An analysis in dynamic epistemic logic and various solutions are presented in [vD03]. But there remained some open questions related to the dynamics. In this contribution we answer one of those questions. They are not trivial, because the interpretation of an announcement that is made towards a solution of the problem, al...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the possibilities identifying mathematical giftedness in elementary schoolers with help Olympiad problems. For this, authors clarify concept “mathematical giftedness”, show relationship between concepts giftedness” and abilities”, indicate most significant abilities from set giftedness. role Olympiads mathematically gifted substantiated. This consis...