After 40 years, one of Colorado’s most challenging math competitions may be coming to a close
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — In 1983, a few years after emigrating to the United States from Russia, Alexander Soifer — a newly hired mathematics professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs — was surprised to learn the ”greatest achievement” for American high schoolers was to play on the football team, as opposed to excelling in music or mathematics.
Soifer, a mathematics Ph.D. who has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Rutgers and Princeton, published about a dozen books on mathematics and is now a tenured professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, decided to change that the best way he know how: a mathematics olympiad.
Today, Soifer admits that he did not succeed. Football remains more popular.
“I did not make [mathematics] as rewarding,” said Soifer, “but I advanced it to the point that when an eighth grader won first prize, he was recognized on the floor of the Colorado State Senate.”
This year, Soifer’s “Colorado Mathematical Olympiad,” now called the “Soifer Mathematical Olympiad,” challenged some of the cleverest middle-to-high school minds from across the country for the 40th consecutive year.
The Soifer Mathematical Olympiad is free of charge and open to any Colorado students in grades 5–12, though out-of-state participants can write to Soifer directly to request permission.
About 200 olympians competed this year, traveling to UCCS from across Colorado, as well as a sizable delegation representing the Scottsbluff High School Math Team from Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
There are only five questions on the one-page, single-sided exam, yet the competition lasts four hours. Many participants brought snacks and drinks. Some brought full lunches.
Each question is a carefully written word problem assembled by Soifer himself.
He has been writing olympiad questions for decades, dating back to his three-year stint on the Soviet Union National Mathematical Olympiad jury in the 1960s.
However, writing original questions that were accessible to both middle and high school students proved uniquely challenging.
“I had to create one [size] fits all, but that means I cannot lean on knowledge… because middle schoolers will be at a disadvantage,” said Soifer, “so I was forced to create different kinds of problems… totally original problems that test creativity.”
For inspiration, Soifer looked to contemporary mathematical research and boiled down dense and complex publications to a handful of simplified questions.
“We don’t want to give research problems because a lot of the solutions are boring and mundane calculations,” he said. “But in all of this are particles of gold.”
Soifer is a “historian of mathematics” and turned to Victorian-era research papers from the likes of Augustus de Morgan, William Rowan Hamilton and Arthur Cayley for source material.
“Beautiful ideas that I extract… and then I dress up as a story.”
Soifer admitted that the questions were difficult, enough that they might stump a number of his UCCS colleagues, particularly question number five, the concluding question that often bests every olympiad participant.
However, Soifer insists that most, if not all, of his questions require very little knowledge at all. Soifer designs questions that middle schoolers lacking any traditional geometry can answer.
Would-be competitors can’t find Soifer’s questions online, though he does publish them after each Olympiad in a 900-page book.
He composes questions that require ingenuity and creativity, a “spark of genius” from competitors. Ones with seemingly obvious answers once they’re revealed.
These were the types of questions that first inspired Soifer’s mathematical and olympiad career decades ago.
Growing up in 1950s and 1960s Moscow, then the capital of the USSR, Soifer felt “duty bound” to perform in his studies, both academic and musical. He studied math in school from Monday to Saturday while taking intensive private piano lessons. He began composing by the age of six.
Soifer “didn’t really like school math,” he said, because he found it formulaic and repetitive.
It wasn’t until a middle school math teacher took him to the Moscow University Mathematical Olympiad that Soifer discovered a different, more artistic side of mathematics.
“Olympiad math was beautiful, surprising, creative,” said Soifer.
He labeled olympiad math a “game of the mind” and deemed it “closer to art than to science” because of the ingenuity and subjectivity that come with forming and applying mathematical theorems.
From then on, Soifer spent four consecutive Sundays competing in olympiad math. He was immediately hooked and immediately successful, picking up awards in sixth and seventh grade.
Soifer could no longer compete in the olympiad after graduating from high school, though he continued to work closely with the competitions. He went on to train students for Moscow’s Math Olympiad team in the Soviet Union Math Olympiad and eventually served on the jury of the Soviet Union National Math Olympiad.
Despite his parents’ wishes, who were both artists and pushed Soifer to become a composer, Soifer pursued mathematics. At just 19, Soifer was on his way to completing a masters and eventually a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Moscow State Pedagogical University.
That same summer, in the August of 1968, the Soviet Union, alongside three other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Soifer was unsettled by the attack.
“For the first time in my life, I realized that to be a citizen means to accept my share of responsibility for what my country does,” he said.
A few years later, he stepped away from his research to avoid enlistment. Soifer, who is Ukrainian and Jewish by descent, said he also experienced anti-Semitic hate from his peers and government.
As the war escalated, Soifer decided to leave the USSR. He waited for six months before receiving political refugee status and crossing through the tightly controlled Soviet borders.
Soifer flew from Vienna to Rome to New York and finally Boston, where he landed a job teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in 1978.
Despite speaking very little English, Soifer taught mathematics while applying to “over a hundred” more permanent positions at other universities, he said.
He received offers from three schools: UMass Boston, UCLA and UCCS.
“UCCS wanted me to come for an interview, and I didn’t want to come,” said Soifer.
“But then, the chair told me on the phone, a magic word. We’ll show you mountains.”
Soifer had never seen mountains before, so he agreed to visit. UCCS gave him “royal treatment,” including a drive along Gold Camp Road and a trip to Leadville for lunch.
“It was beautiful,” he said. “The mountains proved to be even more than I hoped for.”
Now 45 years later, Soifer is a tenured professor at UCCS where he teaches courses in mathematics, as well as in art history and film studies, calling back to a love for the arts inspired by his parents.
Soifer never forgot the mathematics olympiads that shaped his childhood and eventually his professional career. He proposed the idea of an olympiad almost immediately upon arriving at UCCS, though received little support from colleagues.
After three years of hearing “we’ll do it someday,” Soifer took matters into his own hands. He brought a blank sheet of paper to his number theory lecture and made a proposition to his class.
“‘Here is a piece of paper I am passing around,’” said Soifer to his students, “‘and sign up if you are willing to do [the] ungrateful job of organizing mathematics olympiad for middle and high school students of our state.’”
To his surprise, 15 of the 20 students in attendance signed on, and the following April 1984, the first annual Colorado Mathematical Olympiad took place.
In order to receive high marks at the Soifer Mathematical Olympiad, competitors do not necessarily need to get answers exactly right as much as they must demonstrate an innovative and accurate method of thinking towards finding a solution.
This clicked with Matthew Kahle, a C-student in high school math whose creative problem-solving won gold in 1990 and 1991. Kahle now serves as a jury member.
Despite Kahle’s olympiad performance, he was eventually denied admission to UCCS given his 1.9 high school GPA.
Regardless, he continued pursuing mathematics at Pikes Peak State College, then CSU, Fort Collins, the University of Washington, Stanford, and finally Princeton.
Kahle is now a tenured professor of mathematics at Ohio State University but returns to Colorado Springs each year to judge the competition.
Aaron Parsons, now an Associate Professor in the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley, is another success story.
Parsons grew up in Rangely, Colorado, a small northwestern town with fewer than 2,500 residents. He traveled to UCCS on multiple occasions to compete in the olympiad, finally co-winning his senior year.
Parsons went on to study at Harvard and then pursue a doctorate in astrophysics at UC Berkeley.
“It opened my eyes to what was a completely different way of approaching math that was more about creative thinking, thinking out-of-the-box,” said Parsons.
Parsons now has three kids of his own and runs a mathematical competition for elementary schoolers.
On October 11, a week after the five-question, four-hour competition, participants gathered in UCCS’s Berger Hall for a walkthrough of the solutions, a final mathematics lecture from Soifer and the awards ceremony itself.
“Now, 40 years later, starting in 1984 and perhaps ending in 2024, this is the last question,” said Soifer after finishing his explanation of the dreaded question number five.
None of the nearly 200 competitors solved the problem correctly.
Soifer said that the Olympiad had become difficult to maintain, both financially and logistically, due to disputes with current UCCS administrators. He was committed to keeping the event free to the public, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to secure the funding and the space that the university had offered in years past.
In the end, there were more than forty “second honorable mention” winners, about a dozen “first honorable mention” winners, and second and first place finishers.
Joshua Liu, a freshman from Cherry Creek High School, won gold, which includes a $1000 scholarship towards any university or four-year college, a $2000 UCCS Chancellor’s Scholarship for use at UCCS if enrolled, the olympiad pin, and Soifer’s own recently published, 900 page book “The New Mathematical Coloring Book: Mathematics of Coloring and the Colorful Life of Its Creators.”
Jacob Green, a senior at the Stargate Charter School in Thornton, finished second, though he could not be present to accept his medal as he was away presenting research at MIT.
Soifer hopes future generations continue to see mathematics not just as a science, but as an art, “a genre of literature” he said, noting the beautiful complexities and uncertainties that make it applicable to so many different situations.
Soifer, who continues teaching at UCCS, and does not plan on retiring anytime soon, saw the competition as a thank you to the state that welcomed him nearly 50 years ago.
“The Olympiad was my way to thank Colorado, to thank the country for giving me an opportunity of a new start,” said Soifer, “and I want to pass the baton to the next generation of mathematicians.”