Author and Publishing: Canadian Mathematical Society, 1993. - 262
pages.
Preface: Completing its first quarter century, the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad is one of the older national mathematics competitions. Younger than its Easte European counterparts, it predates the Olympiads of the USA, UK and most other countries that have participated in the Inteational Mathematical Olympiad. It is also quite large. More than 200 candidates from all ten provinces are nominated by provincial coordinators on the basis of regional contests, subject to quotas approximately proportional to population.
Thus, at the end of 21 years, seven of the ten provinces had hosted the CMO. In 1990, administrative responsibility was assumed by the Executive Office of the Canadian Mathematical Society in Ottawa. Subsequent chairs of the CMO Committee have mainly been responsible for the task of setting and marking the paper and determining the awards. However, as the committees consist mainly of professors recruited locally, the departments of the host universities (the University of Toronto (1990-1992) and Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario (1993-1995)) have maintained a crucial function.
The CMO problems sub-committee should embody a number of skills. Typically, each committee member proposes a few problems, but these have to be evaluated and often reformulated. Thus, it helps to have someone familiar with extant contest problems, someone who is a stickler for detail and can anticipate errors and misconceptions, and someone with a talent for rewording problems in a particularly clear or elegant way. During the first few years, the competitors were more naive and generally had only a background of standard high school courses. More recently, the top students have prepared themselves specifically for competitions, and exposed themselves to topics in geometry, combinatorics and algebra that went far beyond the ordinary curriculum. Furthermore, thanks to resources like Crux Mathematicorum (a problems joual published by the Canadian Mathematical Society), students have become much more aware of the problem literature. Accordingly, it has become a serious challenge to set papers that would entice the better students with new problems while still keeping them accessible to the ordinary competitor.
Preface: Completing its first quarter century, the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad is one of the older national mathematics competitions. Younger than its Easte European counterparts, it predates the Olympiads of the USA, UK and most other countries that have participated in the Inteational Mathematical Olympiad. It is also quite large. More than 200 candidates from all ten provinces are nominated by provincial coordinators on the basis of regional contests, subject to quotas approximately proportional to population.
Thus, at the end of 21 years, seven of the ten provinces had hosted the CMO. In 1990, administrative responsibility was assumed by the Executive Office of the Canadian Mathematical Society in Ottawa. Subsequent chairs of the CMO Committee have mainly been responsible for the task of setting and marking the paper and determining the awards. However, as the committees consist mainly of professors recruited locally, the departments of the host universities (the University of Toronto (1990-1992) and Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario (1993-1995)) have maintained a crucial function.
The CMO problems sub-committee should embody a number of skills. Typically, each committee member proposes a few problems, but these have to be evaluated and often reformulated. Thus, it helps to have someone familiar with extant contest problems, someone who is a stickler for detail and can anticipate errors and misconceptions, and someone with a talent for rewording problems in a particularly clear or elegant way. During the first few years, the competitors were more naive and generally had only a background of standard high school courses. More recently, the top students have prepared themselves specifically for competitions, and exposed themselves to topics in geometry, combinatorics and algebra that went far beyond the ordinary curriculum. Furthermore, thanks to resources like Crux Mathematicorum (a problems joual published by the Canadian Mathematical Society), students have become much more aware of the problem literature. Accordingly, it has become a serious challenge to set papers that would entice the better students with new problems while still keeping them accessible to the ordinary competitor.