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BY OUR STUDENT CONTRIBUTORS
Fresh Pisuttisarun In 2018, I participated in an unforgettable journey that took me from Bangkok, Thailand to Jakarta, Indonesia, and then to Melbourne, Australia. The World Mathematics Championships is a global series of maths competitions all leading to the final round hosted at the University of Melbourne. With various age divisions and qualifier rounds hosted in several locations across Asia and Europe, the competition attracts thousands of students each year from around the globe.
When I participated in WMC, I was intrigued by the competition’s philosophy and approach to maths. We didn’t receive the traditionally insular experience of taking a multiple-choice theoretical maths exam. Instead, we engaged in diverse rounds that emphasized and fostered creativity, collaboration, presentation, analysis, evaluation and so on — often overlooked yet integral skills for a well-rounded mathematician. Whether engineering, cryptography, or data science, the competition ensured that our understanding of maths was carefully contextualized in a meaningful field of knowledge. As the competition came to an end, I couldn’t help but reflect on its unorthodox style of problem-solving and how this had shed a powerful new light on maths. So, when I was invited to apply as a question-writer for the competition, I knew I had some very large shoes to fill! I started off by writing theoretical maths questions, then began to apply these theoretical questions to real-life situations. Instead of asking students to solve an equation for x and y, I would ask them to find the number of apples and oranges. But even this approach quickly became dull, repetitive, and somewhat useless. After all, why should the students care about how many apples and oranges Alice and Ben have? Instead, I took this one step further. I didn’t apply maths to any old situation for the sake of it, but to situations that were realistic and valuable. Instead, I introduced students to a projectile falling in a gravitational field and asked them to use equations to solve for the speed of its descent. This was inherently more useful: if a student wanted to design a functional parachute, this maths would let them do that. All questions, when unraveled, had a mathematical core; however, the context surrounding this maths governed how valuable that learning experience would be. I even recently attended one of the WMC rounds that took place in Bangkok, Thailand. The competition was hosted at a school not far from my house and I was ecstatic to see the questions I had written being answered live in action! Beyond the immediate pride was the realization that the questions I contributed to this competition would shape the students’ confidence and passion for learning maths, much in the same way as it had shaped mine. When people think of maths, many will imagine baseless theories and foreign symbols on paper. But this outdated notion is now being replaced by more exciting innovations. Maths can also be used to program intelligent software, understand the physics of our existence, build revolutionary robots, and analyze patterns of economic development. Competitions like the WMC are truly paving the way towards an appreciation of maths for the thriving and colorful field that it is. I believe we must utilize these opportunities to instill this appreciation in student mathematicians, starting at a young age.
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