August 08, 2014
Iranian high school students slipped a bit in the math and biology Olympiads this year, but sparkled in computer science.
The five annual science and math Olympiads were held around the world from Hanoi to Cape Town last month. The Olympiads test the smarts of high school students from dozens of countries.
Iranian students did well in every one of them—though not as well as in the 1990s went they often ended up in the top 10 of all the Olympiads. More countries have been learning how to prepare for these events and the competition has heightened.
The worst Iran did this year was 21st in math. Considering the Iranian team was one of 101 teams, that was quite good. But no Iranian team had ever ranked that low. Just last year, the Iranians ranked 10th in math.
In biology, Iran also slipped from 10th last year to 18th this year, equaling its worst previous performance in biology.
In informatics, which is a test of computer science, the four-member Iranian team came in sixth, equaling its best result over the decade and a ranking it had not seen since 2004.
The Olympiads were started by the Soviet Union in 1959 during the Cold War and drew few participants outside he Soviet bloc until the 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, the Olympiads became very popular and began to draw teams from most countries.
China and Chinese ethnics have come to dominate. For example, this year China took first place in three of the five Olympiads and the other two were won by Taiwan (biology) and Singapore (chemistry). And that isn’t all, of the American teams at the Olympiads, almost two-thirds of the contestants had Chinese surnames.
Teams from five countries placed in the top 10 of all five Olympiads—China, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia and the United States.
If you would like to try your hand at this, here is Problem Number Two from this year’s Math Olympiad:
“Let n > 2 be an integer. Consider an n X n chessboard consisting of n2 unit squares. A configuration of n rooks on this board is peaceful if every row and every column contains exactly one rook. Find the greatest positive integer k such that, for each peaceful configuration of n rooks, there is a k X k square which does not contain a rook on any of its k2 unit squares.”