Students of North-Eastern Federal University brought "gold" and "silver" to the university's collection of the 15th season of Mathematical Olympiad of Ariel University in a team competition. In addition, one of the teams won the second place in the blitz stage.

Five teams took part in the Olympiad from NEFU − third team became the winner in a team competition and won the second place in the blitz competition. Teams mostly included students of the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science. As, Egor Fedotov, a graduate student of IMCS, said, the ability to individually solve Olympiad tasks, and except that excellent subject knowledge, knowledge of individual theorems and methods of solving problems that are not discussed in Higher mathematics courses.

"You have to write quickly code to solve a particular problem. For example, there are problems in which it is necessary to solve a three-storey integral, which is hard and long to solve without it. In such cases the code that calculates it helps. In addition, in teamwork it is important to roughly know skills of your teammates to "correctly" distribute tasks between them. 20 minutes is not enough, especially on the last tasks," − said Egor Fedotov, a member of the winner team.

The next Olympiad, for which the graduate student will prepare students is the Olympiad of Belarusian-Russian University, held in Mogilev this February. Egor Fedotov hopes that quarantine restrictions will decrease and students will be allowed to go to other countries.

The captain of the first team that took second place, student of IMCS, Semyon Verhovtsev, thinks that the online format of Olympiad ensures mass participation in it: "For example, five teams with four people each from only our university took part. For me, this plus overrides all disadvantages of this format. When there is more competition, the Olympiad turns out to be more interesting and intriguing."

For Semyon Verhovtsev, an Olympiad is, first of all, a test of knowledge. In addition, one of the features of the online Math Olympiad at Ariel University is that it is a team competition. So it is also the experience of teamwork, which is important too, he sums up.

The first-year master′s student of IMCS, a member of the first team Wu Ba Shang added that every Olympiad for him is a break from routine: "Mathematics is my hobby. There is not a minute that I don't calculate something. I like everything to be clear, so I don't accept any mistakes. In my opinion, main qualities of mathematician are concentration, attentiveness and patience. Mathematics inspires me to study other subjects."

The most memorable Olympiad for a master′s student was the XII International South Eastern European Mathematical Olympiad SEEMOUS-2018 for undergraduate students, which was held in Romania. "Then I was a first-year student who had just entered to NEFU. I won a bronze medal at this Olympiad, which gave me confidence. In the new year I hope that I will have more opportunities to take part in different competitions to test my knowledge, to learn something new and also show my abilities", − Wu Ba Shang commented.