This article describes the selection process, by country, for entrance into the International Mathematical Olympiad.
The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is an annual mathematics olympiad for students younger than 20 who have not started at university.
Each year, participating countries send at most 6 students. The selection process varies between countries, but typically involves several rounds of competition, each progressively more difficult, after which the number of candidates is repeatedly reduced until the final 6 are chosen.
Many countries also run training events for IMO potentials, with the aim of improving performance as well as assisting with team selection.
Famous quotes containing the words mathematical, selection and/or process:
“As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Every writer is necessarily a critic—that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on.... The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg—nine-tenths of him is under water.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children’s and our own needs, works only for a time—because, as one father says, “It’s a new ball game just about every week.” So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion, Dennie, and Palmer Wolf. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)