The 22nd Junior Balkan Mathematical Olympiad (JBMO) was just held in Rhodes, Greece.
The competition which occurred between the 19th-24th June, drew in participants from Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, FYROM, France, Republic of Moldova, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Turkey and Turkmenistan.
This year, three Filipino students won medals; Daryll Carlsten Ko and Sean Eugene Chua took silver medals while Deanne Gabrielle Algenio grabbed a bronze.
The Mathematics Trainers Guild-Philippines (MTG), is an organisation of math experts, which trains Filipino students, like Ko, Chua and Algenio for international math competitions. The President, Dr. Isidro Aguilar congratulated his three contestants for winning medals in the math competition, further adding “this is another honour for our country.”
According to the three contestants, the questions in this year’s contest were extra challenging. Ko said “This year’s JBMO was a mixture of handleable and challenging problems. Some of them only required a direct flow of logic while the others needed very specific observations in order to advance in the problem…It was not easy to think of ideas that could help us make progress in solving each problem.”
Chua also stated that “although the problems seemed straightforward, they were designed in such a way that we were challenged to really think out of the box while being pushed to the limit.”
“Challenging, brain provoking, mind boggling problems but nothing we Pinoy ‘mathletes’ cannot hurdle,” Algenio further added.
