In 2017, 189 mathematicians, representatives of 37 universities among them, came to St. Petersburg to participate in the contest. According to the rules, any participant of the NCUMC can offer his or her own tasks for the upcoming competition – the only criterion is uniqueness.

“The process of choosing tasks looks like this: coaches of the teams gather together and vote for the best tasks for the competition. Of course, participants cannot take part in it; that is why I don’t even know what task was offered by ITMO and whether it was included in the final list or not. To my mind, this year the tasks were more difficult than those of previous years,” said Yuri Alexandrov, ITMO student, who showed one of the best results.

Each university can send as many applicants for the contest as it possible, but only three of them can join the official team of this university. Then one sums up the results of these three participants – this amount of points is a total score of the university. Participants have four hours to solve seven tasks. Also they can use English language dictionaries for assistance, as the working language of this international contest is English.

“It was the first time when I presented solutions for tasks in a foreign language and I found it difficult. I have some problems with translating information given in a task. Also it was not easy to present the solution accurately. As for the level of tasks, the first four ones can be solved by a student with extensive math background, other ones are much more difficult,” said Anna Belolipetskaya, ITMO’s student, who gained the maximum amount of points among the members of her team.

The competition is supervised by the jury consisting of experts from those universities whose students take part in it.

“The final tasks were the most difficult. According to the results, only several participants solved them. I mostly focused on the easiest ones so as to solve them completely. Unfortunately, I lacked time to solve some of them completely,” noted Alexey Latyshev, member of the ITMO’s team.

The results of the North Countries Universities Mathematical Competition are published here.