Brown Students Organize Math Olympiad for 250 High Schoolers

More than 250 high schoolers participated in the inaugural Brown University Math Olympiad (BrUMO) on Saturday, April 5. Over 50 Brown students organized the first-of-its-kind event on the campus between April 4 and 5, welcoming more than 40 teams from high schools nationwide to compete in three rounds of math problem-solving.

Carnegie Mellon Professor of Mathematical Sciences Po-Shen Loh began the awards ceremony by recognizing the efforts of the Brown team before presenting a lecture on Euler's number. The competition featured an individual round, a team round, and a guts round — a fast-paced round featuring short-answer math questions.

Brown's founder and tournament director, Sarah Bao, told The Brown Daily Herald that she remembered participating in “similar competitions in high school” held by universities such as Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology.

When she arrived at Brown as a first-year student, she thought Brown should host a math competition too. She officially began the effort to organize the Math Olympiad last summer with support from Brown's Applied Math Departmental Undergraduate Group. What started as a group of 20 students helping her increased to 50 at the start of Brown's spring semester. She said students took on various tasks such as logistical planning and problem writing.

Outreach to schools proved successful. “Seven or eight (teams) were from Rhode Island,” said Neal Frankenberg, who led the logistics effort for Brown. Other teams traveled to College Hill from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and California.

Bao hopes the success of this year's event will set BrUMO apart from similar competitions by inviting high schoolers of various experience levels to participate and creating more distinctive events for students.

“There's a lot of value in having high schoolers who really enjoy math visit Brown and interact with the math community,” she said. She hopes that students come away from BrUMO “potentially wanting to come to Brown to study math.”