Second Day of Competition

Today the questions and answers session went better. The questions poured in at a more or less constant rate, and I even got one question. As I could have gathered, the question related to the modification we had made last minute, when we inserted one word in the paper. Anyway, we were done with questions by 10:30. I went to pack my bags. We were gonna be leaving around twelve, so that we could meet with the students as they came out of the exam.

I brought my bags to the bus and checked out. As I stood and waited (and note that the heat was killing, as always, they seem to have a constant 37°C here ...) P. approached me. "Let's have one last drink, dear". And so we did. The last Pina Colada of this trip. And it was not bad.

The buses took us into Merida, straight to the conference center where the students were passing their second exam. On the way I scanned through their papers from yesterday. Well, just like I feared I didn't find much of anything in their, apart from one solution to the geometry problem. I went through it step by step, and it was perfect. Phew!

My students looked fairly content though as they came out of the exam. I tried to gather them together, and get estimates on how well they'd done. Well, one thought she'd made good progress in Problem 3, applying Jensen's inequality. Unfortunately I'd already read through her paper and knew she would hardly get any points according to the marking schemes which were very strict for this problem. Another of my students thought she almost held the solution to Problem 6. Again I was skeptical. It's awfully tempting to assume you have figured out a combinatorics problem when finally all you got is some sort of intuitive sense of the fact that something should work. It often doesn't hold much ground. A third student thought he might have something of value in Problem 4. I hadn't seen his paper yet of course, because they just came out of the exam, but it seemed to me that partial points in Problem 4 might be hard to get. It was sort of an all or nothing problem.

The student who had actually solved the geometry problem the previous day was nowhere to be found. I was curious to know if he made any attempts at today's geometry. The kids went looking for him and found him. He had just come out of the exam. Turned out that he had worked on the geometry almost the whole time but hadn't cracked it. What a shame. "I think I almost solved the number theory question", he told me though. "But I only realised it last minute, there was not enough time ..." I'm slightly disappointed. There's a chance of winning a medal if you manage to solve two problems, but it sounds as if my student just missed that chance. Again, I am not expecting many points for partial progress in the number theory problem, because it's solution is so elementary that once you've started solving the problem you've basically finished as well. Hmm, so much for our expectations. Honestly though, we didn't have high expectations. Our team is very inexperienced. Apart from the student who solved the geometry, it would have been unfair to expect much of any of them. The good thing is that they all seem in good spirits. They sound happy, and thrilled to be here in Mexico. For the next two days they're gonna have some fun activities, while we grade the problems.

We are now taken to our hotels. I am staying at the Hyatt. Some leaders are staying at different hotels, Villa Mercedes, Holiday Inn, Fiesta Americana, Conquistador. All hotels in the neighbourhood, but it's still a little disappointing to see them each head to their own place, after the convivial atmosphere at The Reef.

I meet my deputy leader in the lobby of the hotel. We are sharing rooms and she accompanies me to the room where she has already taken quarters and we then head for lunch. After lunch we read the students' papers together and she doesn't find any more in them than I did on my first brief read in the bus. We then go check if we can get access to internet. There is a room on the 1st floor with 5 or 6 computers, but they are all taken already and long queus for availability. So we return to our rooms and work some more 'till dinner, after which we receive the copies of the second day. There is this "solution" of several pages to Problem 6, we decide to save it untill the morning after when we will have rested.