Exeter Medals Add Up at IMO
Kevin Sun ’16 and seniors Yannick Yao and Qi Qi each won medals at the 57th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Hong Kong in July. Qi, the highest scoring female participant, earned silver. Sun and Yao, who achieved perfect scores along with four other contestants, both took home gold.
IMO is an annual mathematics competition for high school students around the globe. This year, over 600 students, representing 109 countries, participated in the two-day examination which consists of six problems. Both days, contestants are presented with three problems to solve within four and a half hours; calculators are not permitted.
Yao competed on the winning U.S. team, while Sun and Qi both competed on the Canadian team, which finished in 12th place. This was Qi’s and Yao’s first time competing at IMO. Sun, however, won bronze in 2013 and gold in 2014 and 2015, securing him a place among the top 20 contestants in the IMO hall of fame.
“This humility, combined with their willingness to teach and help out others makes them leaders in people’s eyes.”
To prepare for IMO, the three Exonians worked on various practice problems and learned techniques to strengthen their problem-solving skills throughout the school year. In addition, they spent three and a half weeks at the Math Olympiad Summer Program (MOP), a camp held for the IMO team members, along with many future candidates. At MOP, students attend lectures, practice problem-solving and compete in mock olympiads.
Qi, who has attended this camp in previous years, described the training as “very effective,” but also noted that its intensity made it “pretty difficult.” The additional pressure of having to go to the IMO soon after meant that she “could not slack off at all,” Qi explained. She went on to say, “unlike in my first summer at MOP, I pushed myself to work hard even during free time, so overall the camp was very stressful but productive.” Fortunately, Qi and the rest of the Canadian team were able to spend several days in Banff relaxing before heading to Hong Kong for the IMO. In contrast to MOP, the olympiad felt “almost like a relief.”
Yao explained that much of his preparation occurred during the school year at math club, where students work on challenging problems and talk through solutions together in order to reach the best problem-solving strategies. He, like Qi, attended MOP which further prepared him for the IMO. One of the most difficult parts for Yao was the night before the first day of the examination. Since the IMO was his first international contest and he was determined to do well, he described getting “quite nervous” in the hours leading up to the first test. “Fortunately, listening to music helped me reduce stress and I felt better as I walked into the exam room,” Yao said.
Yao’s preparation certainly paid off and, given his perfect score, he “cannot be more satisfied” with his performance. Nevertheless, he admitted that luck played a part in his success because none of the problems on the examinations tested his weak points. “For instance, geometry is my weakest subject, but there were no hard geometry problems in the test,” he said.
Qi also felt happy with her performance, though she expressed some disappointment at not being able to solve problem 2 or 6b of the test, either of which would have given her at least two points and pushed her into the gold metal cutoff. “Nonetheless, I’m cool with a silver, since my performances in mock exams places me at around silver medal level,” Qi said.
Mathematics instructor Zuming Feng was also impressed with Yao, Qi and Sun’s performance. “They again did very well even though our bar is extremely high,” he said. He listed “talent, interest and attitude” as important components to their success. Likewise, upper Brian Bae attributed their success at the IMO to a combination of “passion, hard work, and a bit of innate talent.” Bae is a member of Exeter Math Club along with Qi, Yao and formerly Sun, and is also a member of ESSO Math Counts club, of which Yao serves as a co-head. Bae described Yao as a “great teacher,” and recalled seeing Yao and Qi always working on some type of math problem. “I can literally feel their passion for the subject when I’m talking to them,” he said.
As Math Club leaders, Yao and Qi also work hard to organize events such as the Exeter Math Club Competition (EMCC), a math contest for middle-schoolers hosted by Exeter annually. As one of two people on the problem committee for the EMCC, Qi gathered problems as well as wrote her own, and then sorted them by difficulty to create the final problem set for the competition. According to senior Eric Tang,
“it’s a really involved process and requires a deep understanding of not only how to solve problems, but also how others solve problems and how hard those problems are.” In preparation for last year’s American Regions Mathematics League (ARML), Yao organized practices, selected questions and moderated mock relay rounds, which Tang described as “enormously helpful.”
Senior Eliza Khokhar also commended Yao, Qi and Sun as leaders within math club. Although their ability to perform exceptionally in competition is widely known, all three remain humble according to Khokhar. “This [humility], combined with their willingness to teach and help out others makes them leaders in people’s eyes,” she explained.
Reflecting on what motivates Sun, Yao and Qi to pursue such high levels of mathematical excellence, Tang suggested that “the three of them are driven to do math largely because they’ve grasped, as many people never do, how beautiful and clever mathematics can be.” He attributed their “phenomenal” problem-solving skills to the incredible amount of work and devotion that they put into what they do.
Tang also saw this devotion carry through in how they teach and pass on knowledge to those around them. He recalled a time when he partnered with Qi during a team round practice and she assigned him a small facet of the problem to prove. After half an hour, she had solved the rest of the problem while Tang was still struggling to work through his part. She went ahead and did it for him in about a minute, but “instead of just plowing forward onto the other problems, she took the time to explain her technique and her steps so I could understand,” Tang explained. Expressing his gratitude for her patience, he added, “it was also just a cool insight into an amazingly brilliant mind.”