Pauline in winning international Mathematics team

The United Kingdom came top in the inaugural Masters of Mathematics competition held in Romania over 7th to 11th February.  Teams of three school students from each nation competed to solve four fiendishly hard problems in five hours.  The United Kingdom team consisted of Jonathan Lee (Loughborough Grammar School), Tim Hennock (Christ's Hospital) and Dominic Yeo (St Paul's, London), who won gold, silver and bronze medals respectively.

The competition was held at Tudor Vianu school, an elite maths and computing school in Bucharest.
The UK beat the traditionally strong mathematical nations of Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.  This is the best performance by a UK mathematical team since we came 5th at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1996 in Bombay, one place above China and one place behind Russia. 

The UK's training activities for mathematics competitions were featured last year in the highly acclaimed documentary Beautiful Young Minds (BBC2, Director Morgan Matthews). Jonathan Lee, who won the UK's gold medal in Romania, featured as a central character in that programme. Jonathan finished third overall, behind a boy from Poland and a girl from Serbia. He solved three and a half of the four problems.  Jonathan also holds a UK rocket height record.

The team leader was Dr Geoff Smith of the University of Bath, assisted by Jacqui Lewis of St Julian's School, Carcavelos, Portugal.  The team was selected and trained by the British Mathematical Olympiad, a branch of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust, under the direction of Dr Geoff Smith (University of Bath) and Dr Ceri Fiddes (Stowe School).