An olympiad training weekend at Päivölä
Translated from the Finnish original, first published in January 2018. Details such as how often the weekends are held may have changed since; see matematiikkakilpailut.fi for current information.
Every sixth weekend, Päivölä hosts the national mathematics olympiad training. It brings together mathematically gifted upper and lower secondary school students from all over Finland. This weekend the turnout was huge: more than 50 young people came.
Training weekends start on Friday at 18:30 and end on Sunday afternoon. On Friday there is a training test with a few competition problems. The results help in selecting Finland’s teams for international competitions.
The number theory sessions covered, among other things, properties of the Carmichael lambda function.
For the Saturday and Sunday sessions, participants are split into two groups by experience. One group studied geometry in the auditorium. The other worked in Kivitalo, the School of Mathematics building, on number theory problems on Saturday and functional equations on Sunday. Time flies when you’re working on hard problems. The problems are often long – over the weekend we managed about twenty.
The training is also a chance to get to know like-minded people. In the evenings, after the teaching, people chat and play games such as bughouse chess.
More information about the training and about mathematics competitions in Finland is available at matematiikkakilpailut.fi.
Written by Olli and Jaakko