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.
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.
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.
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:
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.