Three Filipino students won medals at an international math Olympiad held in Greece.
According to the Mathematics Trainers Guild-Philippines, Daryll Carlsten Ko of St. Stephen’s High School and Sean Eugene Chua of Xavier School bagged silver medals while Deanne Gabrielle Algenio of Makati Science High School grabbed a bronze medal at the 22nd Junior Balkan Mathematical Olympiad held from June 19 to 24 in Rhodes, Greece.
The three, accompanied by team leader Kerish Villegas, represented the country in the contest, which drew participants from Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, France, Republic of Moldova, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Philippines, Romania, Serbia,Turkey and Turkmenistan.
“We congratulate our three contestants for winning medals in the math competition. This is another honor for our country,” said Dr. Isidro Aguilar, MTG president.
The MTG is an organization of math experts which trains Filipino students for international math competitions.
According to the three contestants, questions in this year’s contest were challenging.
“This year’s JBMO was a mixture of handleable and challenging problems. Some of them only required a direct flow of logic while the others needed very specific observations in order to advance in the problem,” said Ko. “It was not easy to think of ideas that could help us make progress in solving each problem.”
Chua commented that “although the problems seemed straightforward, they were designed in such a way that we were challenged to really think out of the box while being pushed to the limit.”
“Challenging, brain provoking, mind-boggling problems but nothing we Pinoy mathletes cannot hurdle,” said Algenio.