High-IQ Battle for the Gold

U.S. whizzes show that they know the score in math olympiad

Like typical teen-agers at a summer camp, they dressed in shorts, T shirts and running shoes, wore their hair in every length and style, and whiled away the hours tossing Frisbees. But there was nothing ordinary about them. The 192 youths who descended upon Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., last week might have impressed even Pythagoras. The world's best and brightest high school math students, they had come from 27 countries, including the U.S., U.S.S.R., Britain, France, Canada and Hungary (but not China), to compete in the 1981 International Mathematical Olympiad.

The brainy battle of wits began in the East bloc, where youthful talent in mathematics is cultivated as lovingly as it is in sports, chess and the ballet. Rumania won the first olympiad in 1959, although the Soviets have been the best performers since then, taking a total of nine golds in what has usually been, in spite of its name, an annual event. The U.S., uneasy about going up against the fearsome East Europeans, did not enter until 1974. But the Yanks have done surprisingly well. They came in second on their first try, then in 1977 won the top spot, becoming the first Western team to do so. This summer, for the first time, they were the hosts.

The all-male U.S. contingent, ranging in age from 14 to 18, was selected in a rigorous elimination that began with the Annual High School Mathematics Exams, a multiple-choice test given to more than 420,000 students last March. The top 150 finishers then went on to the U.S.A. Math Olympiad in May. The eight finalists, along with 15 other youths who hope to qualify in future years, spent four weeks at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. There they sharpened their skills with military-like drilling (reveille at 6:15 a.m., followed by seven hours of problem solving) under Brooklyn-born Coach Murray Klamkin, 60, of the University of Alberta.

The final reckoning came on two consecutive days last week when the competitors, in two 4 1/2-hour sessions, grappled with six problems, selected by an international committee only days before the contest to prevent leaks. These tested skills in geometry, number theory and algebra, yet demanded creativity and originality as much as textbook learning. (Sample problem: three congruent circles have a common point O and lie inside a given triangle. Each circle touches a pair of sides of the triangle. Prove that the incenter and the circumcenter of the triangle, and the point O are collinear.)* Though the problems were Greek to laymen and probably would have taxed many a math teacher, the test left the youngsters, especially the Americans, totally unimpressed. "This was a letdown," complained Harvard-bound Benjamin Fisher, 18, of New York City, who said that the exam was far too easy for so important a contest. "I was insulted." Added Jeremy Primer, 16, of Maplewood, N.J.: "It was a joke."

That sounded like youthful arrogance. But at week's end, after the multilingual results had been tallied up, it was clear that the Americans really knew the score. Of the eight competitors, four had perfect papers. That made the U.S. team the leader with 314 points out of a possible 336, followed by West Germany (312) and Britain (301). The Soviets, with only six entrants, placed a poor ninth.

* Hint: connect the centers of the circles to form a triangle, which turns out to be a similarly aligned shrunken (or homothetic, as mathematicians say) version of the original triangle.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.