The three-member Brandeis team of Nikolai Kivva, Catinca Alexandru and Mason Price took first place in the Math Olympiad held at Boston College on November 17, 2023. Eleven teams from different universities in Massachusetts took part in the competition. At the start of the competition, the team developed a strategy: in the first 15 minutes, each member studied all the proposed problems, tried them, and chose what each could handle. The problem sheet consisted of seven problems of approximately the same level of difficulty, but from different branches of mathematics, ranging from ordinary algebra to graph theory. The Brandeis team successfully completed six of the proposed problems, only failing to find the sum of an infinite series.
After winning the competition, the Brandeis team listened to a series of talks by professors from different universities, including a great talk on random fluctuations by Jonathan Touboul, Professor of Mathematics and Ephraim Zimmerman with his research on genetic algorithms, both from Brandeis University.
A banquet for the participants followed the competition. The banquet provided participants an opportunity to meet and have a great evening with other participants. The majority of students are juniors or seniors studying math, however despite such stiff competition, the Brandeis team took home first place.
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