International Mathematics Competition for University Students • Since 1994
IMC 2020

27th IMC 2020

took place

25th July - 30th July 2020




London’s Global University

PRINCIPLE SPONSOR:

PRIMARY SPONSORS:


This year's competition and next year's competition in 2021 are organized by University College London. This year's competition will be held On-Line and next year's competition in 2021 will be hosted by the American University in Bulgaria in Blagoevgrad.

Every participating university enters several students and one or more Team Leaders. Individual students without a Team Leader are welcome. Each Team Leader is expected to hold an academic position in a Faculty of the Institution that they represent.

Subjects of the contest

The competition is planned for students completing their first, second, third or fourth year of university education with a maximum age of participants being 23 years of age at the time of the competition, although exceptions can be made. There is no minimum age limit. Problems are from the fields of Algebra, Analysis (Real and Complex), Geometry and Combinatorics. The working language is English.

Selection of the Problems

The problems are chosen by the International Problem Selection Committee from those received in advance by the President of the Jury, Professor John Jayne.

Evaluation

The students' work is evaluated by Team Leaders and other Professors and Assistant Professors using criteria provided by the Jury.

Teams contest

Although this is an individual event, the Universities traditionally divide their participants into groups of four each. The number of students in the teams is, however, not fixed.

IMC Ethics Committee

The Ethics Committee watches and guides he participants and help them keep fair and honest. The chairman of the Committee is Ivan the Confessor.

IMC 2021

Next year's competition in 2021 will a residential competition and a condition of participation is that all participating students stay in the Hall of Residence provided by the organisers. Over the past twenty six competitions we have had participants from over two hundred institutions from over fifty countries.

Individual Results

Team's Results

Virtual Golden, Silver and Bronze Magnifyig Glasses for The Most Effective Team Leaders

Important Information for IMC 2020 Participants

For teamless students

If there is a team from your university we will ask the teamleader leader to invigilate your work. Otherwise you have to choose between three options for the starting time: Asian, European and American.

  • The Asian Option is to start the contest at 2:00 UTC and finish at 6:00 UTC. For example, this is 9:00 to 13:00 in Hanoi and Novosibirsk and 8:00–12:00 in Bangladesh.
  • The European Option is to start the contest at 7:00 UTC and finish at 11:00 UTC. This is 8:00 to 12:00 in the UK, 9:00 to 13:00 in Central Europe and 10:00 to 14:00 in Moscow and Kiev.
  • The American Option is to start the contest at 14:00 UTC and finish at 18:00 UTC. This is 9:00 to 13:00 in Mexico City and 11:00 to 15:00 in Rio de Janeiro.

You have to set up a webcamera that captures you and your desk and connect to a video call. It is allowed to use only one camera if there are more students in the same room.

By 15 minutes before start, you have to connect the video, download and print the problems. The video link will be sent you by e-mail.

Registration

Please don't leave registration to the last moment. Each student has to enter their Team Leader, in order to declare that they belong to that team. The Team Leader also has to enter their team members' e-mail addresses. In both cases, the address must be typed precisely. We have seen several difficulties caused by using multiple e-mail addresses, mixing lower and upper case letters or putting spaces in e-mail addresses. We try to correct errors. If you have any difficulty, please contact the organizers.

The competition is planned for students completing their first, second, third or fourth year of university education with a maximum age of participants being 23 years of age at the time of the competition, although exceptions can be made.

Each Team Leader is expected to hold an academic position in a Faculty of the Institution that they represent.

The registration fee is 25 GBP (British Pounds) for students who belong to a team, so both the student and their team leader must declare that the student belongs to the team. In all other cases the student is considered "teamless" and their fee is 50 GBP (British Pounds). There is no fee for Team Leaders.

The deadline for paying the registration fee is 22 July. From 23 July, registration will be closed and all students who did not pay, and all leaders who are not leaders or deputy leaders of a team, will be deleted.

Opening and Closing Ceremony

We plan YouTube broadcasts from the IMC's YouTube channel.

The Opening Ceremony starts on 25 July, 14:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

The Closing Ceremony starts on 30 July, 14:00 UTC.

Please check your time zone for your local time.

Problem selection

The contest problems will be selected by the International Problem Selection Committee. There will be no jury meeting for problem selection.

Contest Days

The two contest days are 26 and 27 July.

On each day, there will be 4 problems for 4 hours each day. The students must write their solutions on A4 or US letter papers. Only the standard drawing tools (pens, straightedges etc.) and printed dictionaries are allowed. Using any electronic tool or printed material is not allowed. The scripts should not contain any text, name or mark from which the student can be identified. The language of the contest is English; solutions written in other languages will not be evaluated.

The teams are free to choose when to start the exam, but all members of the team should start at the same time, with downloading and printing the problems. The problems will be accessible from 0:00 UTC; all downloads will be logged.

At the end of the exam, each student has to produce 5 files, containing the solutions:

Day 1Day 2
prob1.pdf
prob2.pdf
prob3.pdf
prob4.pdf
draft1.pdf
 prob5.pdf
prob6.pdf
prob7.pdf
prob8.pdf
draft2.pdf

The scripts must be uploaded before 24:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), but the time between downloading the problems and uploading the scripts should not be longer than 6 hours.

For creating the files it is recommended to use the application named CamScanner, available both for Android and Apple based cell phones. Using CamScanner it is easy to make photographs of the papers, crop, resize and rearrange the pages and save the pictures into a PDF. If your phone has internet connection, you can upload the files immediately.

Each student will receive his personal upload link. Please use only your own link.

For a demonstration, we made a short video. Please view it to see how to use CamScanner. Test different camera settings; perhaps it is better if flash is switched on.

Invigilation

The Team Leaders have to organize invigilating the students' work and ensure that their work is fair.

The best is if your students work in the same room and the Team Leader invigilates the exam. Otherwise, a possible solution can be if the team leader watches the students by some video calls like Google Hangouts, Meet, Skype etc. In that case the students have to set up a webcamera that records the place.

Grading

All leaders are expected to participate in grading. We created a project at ZulipChat for the grading discussion. All Team Leaders will be invited there. Further information for Team Leaders will be posted in ZulipChat.