More than 90 high school students gather for USM Math Olympiad

The 7th edition of the meeting, organized by the Department of Mathematics, also included a keynote address by Dr. Jaime San Martin, winner of the 2023 National Prize for Exact Sciences.

Editorial of the Union of the Capital. With the participation of nearly a hundred third and fourth year students from the Valparaíso region, the 7th edition of the Federico Santa María Mathematical Olympiad was held, an event organized by the Department of Mathematics of the Federico Santa María Technical University, which aims to achieve the objectives of creating a space for competition and disseminating science.

In this 2024 edition, the competitors participated in two days marked by challenges and keynote talks led by academics from the USM Department of Mathematics, Dr. Carolina Rey and Dr. Alberto Mercado, as well as the intervention of the special guest of the edition, National Prize for Exact Sciences 2023 and researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling, Dr. Jaime San Martin.

“It’s a really important activity at the university, because it allows high school students to get closer to what we do every day in research and creating new mathematics,” says Dr. Pedro Monteiro, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Physics, who, along with his colleague Dr. Roberto Villaflor, supervised and guided the organizing team of students from the Mathematical Civil Engineering program in carrying out the event.

The management team was satisfied with the results of the competition, as well as the participation of high school students from communities such as Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, Quilpuí, Villa Alemana, Quillota, Puchoncafe, and others. “Our project is about making mathematics accessible in its different aspects: in the difficult and challenging way that the Olympic exam represents, as well as being able to see it from the perspective of mathematicians who have studied it in depth, which is the goal of “Dissemination Conversations”, says Ernesto Triomon Araya, representative of the organizing team, accompanied by his colleagues Benjamín Bravo Carrasco, Adrian López Martínez and Nicolás Boyardi Alache, who received part of the funding for the activity thanks to the “Open Science USM” competition funding.

Likewise, the young Sansanos highlighted the participation and collaboration of the Director of the Mathematics Department, Dr. Salomón Alarcón, as well as the AC3E and AM2V research laboratories, entities that, according to them, contributed to this “impulse to share and disseminate” mathematics, removing the negative cloak that usually exists in it.