03 AMC 1981-90

1981: Consolidation and development

In 1981 the entry numbers were still growing rapidly each year and by this time the organisation had extended and consolidated its administrative structure. In addition to the AMC management committee, which was the day to day administrative committee, and making most of the key decisions, there was by now a Governing Board, Committee of State Directors, and the Problems Committee, which had grown and developed an ongoing system which was proving successful.

The Governing Board was essentially the broadest committee of stakeholders, and at a high level. It comprised senior representatives of the sponsors, Canberra CAE and professional societies, in addition to the key members of the AMC management committee itself. To an extent the word "Governing" was rather a misnomer, as the AMC management committee did the "governing". However whereas the situation is probably a hypothetical one, because of the cross membership of the committees, if the Governing Board had insisted on something, it would presumably have had its way, even if the AMC management committee disagreed. The Governing Board was more correctly "Advisory" however, and evolved into the Advisory Committee of the Trust in later years.

This is a photo of the Board at a 1981 meeting, from left Peter Taylor (AMC), Jo Edwards (AMC), Bernhard Neumann (AusMS and CMA), Sam Richardson (Canberra CAE Principal), Brian Chaseling (Wales Bank), Peter O'Halloran (AMC), Tony Benner (Wales Bank), Chris Heyde (Academy of Science), Marjorie Carss (AAMT).

Meanwhile State Directors, who had been initially identified in 1978, had now become more permanent and met regularly as a group, with other stakeholders.

The group photographed in 1981, from left Peter Brown (AMC Treasurer), Alan Lowe (Wales Bank rep), Marjorie Carss (AAMT), Bruce Henry (Victoria), Jo Edwards (AMC), Andrew Ferguson (South Australia), Sally Bakker (AMC), David Haimes (Western Australia), Jim Kelly (Tasmania), Steve Murray (Queensland), Bill Akhurst (New South Wales), Ann Richards (Northern Territory), Peter O'Halloran (AMC), Gus Gale (New Zealand).

Meanwhile in an adjacent room the Problems Committee would meet.

Here is the 1981 Committee, from left, Bob Bryce (ANU), John Blake (University of Wollongong), Dennis Thorpe (ACT), Declan King (ACT), Ann Murray (Qld), Brother Kevin Friel (NSW), Robin Thornely (ACT), Peter Taylor (Canberra CAE, Chairman), Warren Atkins (Canberra CAE), John Carty (ACT), John Munro (Canberra CAE). Ann was Steve's wife, and herself head of a maths department in a Brisbane high school, and was guest for a day.

The medallist list and other information from 1981 can be found here.

1982: The growth continues

In 1982 the numbers in the AMC went well over 200K. Everything continued to thrive.

The medallist list and other information from 1982 can be found here.

Here is the 1982 Problems Committee. From left Chris Harman (Mitchell CAE, Bathurst), John Munro (CCAE), George Berzsenyi (Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas, USA), Jim Williams (University of Sydney), Pierre-Olivier Legrand (Papeete, French Polynesia), Peter Taylor (CCAE, Chairman), Anne Street (University of Queensland), Bob Bryce (ANU), John Blake (University of Wollongong), John Carty (ACT), Dennis Thorpe (ACT), Declan King (ACT), Warren Atkins (CCAE). Kneeling in front is Peter O'Halloran (CCAE).

1983: Into the deep end

1983 saw another year of supernova growth. Many things were happening.

Towards the end of 1982, Peter O'Halloran walked into my room, as excited as I ever saw him. He showed me a letter from a Paul Halmos. We confirmed that the letter was from the legendary US mathematician and mathematics expositor Paul Halmos. Basically it was just of about three paragraphs. He started off by saying he had seen a lot of mathematics competition question papers and he normally did not get excited. He said a copy of the Australian one had come to his desk. He said this stood out as something special and it had moved him to writing a special letter to us congratulating us on having set such beautiful questions.

Peter felt that people such as Jo Edwards and I should travel and learn from the same experiences as he had experienced. He knew the US had introduced a new AIME competition (like the later Australian AIMO) and arranged for Jo and I to obtain an invitation to travel to the US to attend the Problems Committee, chaired by George Berzsenyi. This was to be held at the joint AMS/MAA conference at Denver in January 1983. Jo traveled with her husband John, I traveled via French Polynesia, to learn from the local interest in us, and arranged to go on to Waterloo, and spend a few days learning what the Canadians do.

While in Denver, Jo and I asked if Paul Halmos was there, as we'd like to meet him, explaining the background. George said yes, he knew Paul, and knew Paul would be there. He turned around and saw him and took us to meet him. Paul was very kind to us and repeated verbally to us exactly what he had said in the letter to Peter.

The meeting was very useful for Jo and me. We got to know the American mathematicians who set their top problems and benefited from the Problems Committee discussions, exactly how they set their problems. In particular we met other legendary characters. I had met Sam Greitzer in Australia, but he was particularly kind and helpful to us, as were several others such as Walter Mientka, Steve Maurer, Stanley Rabinowitz, Harold Reiter and others.

And I had a similar experience the following week in Canada's winter, meeting such people as Ken Fryer, Ron Dunkley, Ed Anderson and Lloyd Auckland, who had set up the Canadian Competition. Staying at Ken's house was a special experience and I also met Ken's son, who first introduced me to TeX, which became the standard mathematical type-setting system.

Back home. The logistics of running such a large event were straining our limited office space and we had to hire warehouse space at the nearby industrial suburb of Mitchell. During major packing periods we had to hire casual staff. One source was our children, during school holidays. But we needed a large work force for other times of the year and the tradition of the packing ladies had started. Pictured above are two of the packing ladies working at Mitchell. The woman on the right was Jessica O'Ferrall, who later became one of our long term office staff members, in fact one of her later jobs was to be the packing ladies supervisor.

Peter O'Halloran had been awarded an OAM and he is pictured above being invested at Government House by the Governor General Sir Ninian Stephen.

The 1983 Committee, from left, Sally Bakker, Peter Brown, Jo Edwards, Peter Taylor, Charlie Clark, Warren Atkins.

For me I gained valuable administrative experience. Peter O'Halloran took study leave during the second half of the year and I was appointed Acting Executive Director. I felt as though I had been thrown into the deep end, when, the day after Peter had left for overseas, Sam Richardson called me into his office and instructed me to change the date of the national presentation which had been arranged with Dame Leonie Kramer, as he and CCAE Council Chairman Doug Waterhouse couldn't make the arranged one. It exactly coincided with the beginning of a well-publicised 2-week crisis for Dame Leonie, who was Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Commission at the time, and was embroiled with meetings. After many attempts I finally made phone contact with Dame Leonie, when she called me, and she was very happy to oblige.

I was very nervous about the medal ceremony, having to give the Executive Director's speech, something which I prepared very carefully, even with a paragraph in French, with which I trained also carefully under native speaker instruction. The function in the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney, with Dame Leonie Kramer as guest, did go well though, and the whole experience was valuable in building my confidence for the future. The medallist list and other information from 1983 can be found here.

The Problems Committee

In 1976 I was assigned to administration and Warren Atkins to chair the Problems Committee. But by 1977 Jo Edwards had swapped with me to take on administration as she had a son good enough to win prizes and didn't want to be seen to be accessing the paper. Then Warren went on Study Leave in 1979 and I took over as Chair of the Problems Committee on my return from England at the start of the year and remained in the position until Peter O'Halloran's death, when I passed the job back to Warren, although I stayed on the Committee. The Problems Committee became an institution, a close-knit group of academics and teachers who shared a large degree of cameraderie. The 1983 committee is shown below and there is a photo of the 1994 Committee in Chapter 6.

Back row of the 1983 Committee from left, Pierre-Olivier Legrand (French Polynesia), John Blake (University of Wollongong), Bob Bryce (ANU), Bruce Devlin (Victoria), Dennis Thorpe (ACT), Ron Scoins (University of Waterloo, Canada), John Carty (ACT), Warren Atkins (CCAE). Front row Peter Taylor (CCAE, Chair), Anne Street (University of Queensland), Philippe Aubret (Scientific Attache, French Embassy, Canberra), Jim Williams (University of Sydney), Chris Harman (Mitchell CAE, Bathurst), John Munro (CCAE), Jo Edwards (CCAE). As can be seen, the practice of bringing in an overseas mathematician to keep a strong infusion of ideas from afar had been well and truly started. It can also be seen we had excellent relations with the French Embassy, which was only too willing to help us with French translations.

As indicated there were normally about 15 members, of whom 12 formed a hard core, two might be invited in from overseas and one state moderator would be called in in rotation. In the above photo Ron Scoins and Pierre-Olivier Legrand were the two overseas members, Pierre-Olivier being not too far away with his country a participant, and Philippe being invited in to support him.

I think it fair to say the two major characters over the years were Jim Williams, seen above and further above in the 1982 photo, and Brother Kevin Friel, seen in the above photo of the 1981 Committee and also in the Chapter 6 photograph of the 1994 Committee. Both were on the committee for many years.

Jim Williams' life tribute, hyperlinked in the above paragraph, alludes to his colourful personality and sense of humour. Steeped in Sydney traditions he was a great advocate of geometry and we could never ask enough questions on this. One day we were discussing a problem and Jim declared it was so difficult he couldn't solve it and it was too hard for question 30. Bob Bryce was seated next him and suggested he look at a certain construction line he had noticed. Jim took a look at the construction line, took a deep breath and then to riotous laughter around the table, he composed himself and declared "This problem is trivial, it is too simple to even be question 1!"

Kevin was from a cane-farming family in North Queensland, but had come to Sydney at a young enough age to be also bound to Sydney traditions in mathematics teaching. He was involved widely in the public exam system and one of Sydney's best-known teachers. A Marist brother, he had become Head of Maths at St Joseph's College at Hunters Hill, but later transferred to other schools, including Parramatta Marist High School, Marist College at Kogarah andMarist College at Auburn.

He first wrote to me to discuss a question from one of our earliest papers. I discussed this with Peter O'Halloran and we decided we should invite him to join the Committee. At the time Kevin was already at Kogarah and he noted this was the school which not only had Peter attended, but also the Kingsgrove Slasher and Cardinal Gilroy. Peter figured that on various measures he was somewhere in between these two well-known identities.

Kevin had a great liking for red wine and I believe a healthy interest in horse racing. One question we were considering involved mixing various blends of red wine. As Chair of the committee I suggested that it may be not a good idea to be setting for school students questions which involved alcoholic beverages. Kevin declared that if we proceeded with this question we would definitely not get any complaints from the Catholic Church. There had also been a question on probability in which betting was involved. Kevin made a similar declaration. Whatever confidence he may have given me about the Catholic Church's position, I still changed the context of these questions.

While at St Joseph's Kevin had a student called Jack Waterford. Jack had become Editor of the Canberra Times, and as such he had a serious influence on life in Canberra. Kevin had maintained good relations with many students, including other notable ones now living in Canberra, but Jack was a favourite and he would invite him to our dinners as his guest. Jack also had ongoing mathematical interest and fitted in very well socially with the committee.

In fact Kevin won a BH Neumann Award in 1997 which was presented at the dinner that year. The above photo shows from left Bernhard Neumann, Kevin, Jack Waterford and Warren Atkins.

1983: The two most famous problems

1983 was also the year in which our two best and most talked about problems were set. Both were masterpieces posed by Bob Bryce of the ANU and had all the qualities which I would designate as ideal for the AMC. Both were easy to understand. Both came from the real world. And both required some good logical thinking. You could not look at the question and guess once you had seen a trick.

The first was the Southern Cross problem. One of the reasons why geometry declined in the syllabus is because syllabus framers did not see direct application in later life and were looking for it. Most geometry problems in text books and exams had been set in the abstract. And syllabus framers did not appreciate that geometry was not so much there for direct application, but a study which supplied problems in which students learned to think logically and appreciate the exact standards of proof.

But in this problem Bob gave some data about the elevation of the Southern Cross from Canberra, and Canberra's latitude, and asked how far north you can see the Southern Cross (it may surprise some to know that it can be seen from some northern latitudes). The solution required a good knowledge of the circle geometry and the solution given used cyclic quadrilaterals, all classic stuff at the time.

The solution gave us an opportunity to discuss application, as it transpired that in the pioneering aviation times, French aviators such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry relied on the Southern Cross for navigation across the Sahara, in the northern hemisphere, as they were establishing routes to South America.

The other problem was about socks, essentially asking how many ways with four pairs of socks of different colour for each pair can you hang them on a clothes line so that no sock is next to its mate.

I was uncomfortable with Bob's proposed solution, which involved induction on the number of colours, which I found hard to understand, and I felt we could not rely on students understanding it. However I found a nice way of systematically counting them which took enough time, and needed a lot of care, to qualify it for the end of the paper. Once I found this solution I went ahead with it, giving this solution.

But a few weeks later I attended a seminar in which Mike Newman, who had not seen my solution, gave a brilliant solution which depended on the inclusion-exclusion principle. I believe good maths problems are better if we can give two quite independent solutions leading to the same answer, and this one exactly slotted in. In recent times this problem could have been set as a three-digit integer answer question as we now used for the last five questions, and this problem has a high three-digit answer which one could not guess. My full solution to this problem is given on this web site under the mathematics Contents Section 06 (counting exhaustively), while Mike's is the one in section 10 (counting systematically).

When we first started the AMC I was concerned that we could run out of ideas and find it hard to maintain standards. But the model we used always gave us plenty of choice. We seemed to come up with better ideas each year. We also had a nice blend of university people and teachers. The teachers were always respected also when they said something was not suitable. Some composers were good with special themes. Another was Martin Ward, also of the ANU, who seemed to specialise in composing problems in 3-dimensional space, for example.

We also had good humour with the French mathematicians on the committee. One logic problem we set had kangaroos telling the truth and frogs telling lies. We arranged for the French language papers to reverse these roles, and then we claimed in the solutions that we had only noticed after the event that the French had done this to us.

1984: New activities, ICME and WFNMC

Peter returned home by January 1984 and immediately after arrival called me and arranged for us to have dinner the following evening. He was very excited as he had a new idea and wanted to sound me out on it. He wanted to set up a World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions, an international forum to enable mathematicians running competitions in different countries to exchange ideas. It was pretty difficult to criticise this idea and I was encouraging. He was very keen.

ICME, the international conference on mathematics education, held every four years, was to be held in Australia later in the year and this would provide an ideal place in which to found the organisation. Peter became very busy ensuring that his (by now) many contacts around the world would attend, and ensuring we had a meeting at ICME-5, to be held in Adelaide, to launch the organisation.

It is now history that approximately 20 mathematicians attended the Adelaide meeting and the WFNMC was founded, with Peter as its first President. The main activity for the next few years would be the establishment of a newsletter. Warren Atkins was appointed to be the editor and he did a very good job with this, which was to grow to become a refereed journal, which Warren continued to edit for 20 years.

The AMC continued to grow and in fact passed 300K for the first time. The medallist list and other information from 1984 can be found here.

As indicated above I learned a lot of things in this period. We had always expected there would be security problems but until this point none had been detected. However this time there was an irregularity. I had the job of detecting it, analysing it and in solving it I had the delicate job of phoning the school Principal. Very fortunately the Principal was very cooperative. And also fortunately, whereas the organisation developed what I believed were outstanding methods of detecting security problems and dealing with them, over time there were few occurrences, particularly at the top end. We developed very good methods, with the help of the State Directors, of checking the credentials of any potential medallist, via teacher interviews, etc. Unfortunately for Peter, another problem occurred a few years later. Peter had a very difficult time with the Principal concerned. These issues are not easy.

1985: A year of contrasting emotions

1985 was to prove a year of strikingly contrasting emotions. On the one hand we had our most spectacular medal ceremony, with the guest of honour being His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. On the other hand our dear colleague Jo Edwards passed away in May and left us very sad indeed. Jo had made her mark not just for her committee contributions, but particularly for editing and several articles, some with Monash's Gilah Leder (later to win an ICMI Felix Klein medal). Jo had a passionate interest in the performance of girls, and was very motivated to gain an understanding about what differences their were between performances by girls and boys. In one noted article, headed Marjory, Raeleen and Betty, she noted that the problem with the biggest difference favouring boys, was one involving girls' names. In fact the three girls were named after Australian noted Olympic runners, and Marjory Jackson was to become Governor of South Australia and one day be guest of honour at a national AMC Medal Ceremony.

Jo had been diagnosed with cancer the previous year just before attending ICME. For a long time we were hopeful that the various therapies would work. Unfortunately, ultimately her condition declined and she passed away late in May.

The relationship with the Duke was very interesting. In 1978 I had worked in the UK and became an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, one of the main British professional societies in mathematics. I was intrigued by the fact that my certificate had the Duke's signature, and on inquiring discovered he was a very active supporter of mathematics and the Institute. I suggested to Peter that he write to the Duke, asking him to become patron of the AMC. To our delight he responded positively and accepted.

In 1985 he was to visit Melbourne at about the right time for us and we invited him as Patron to present the medals. To our delight he again accepted and arrangements were made to hold the presentation in Government House, where he was staying. Due to political reasons, and after the program was printed, he stayed at the Hilton Hotel instead, and the function was transferred there. The Duke was a natural, interacting with the students and a wonderful time was had during his presence.

The Duke is seen above with Peter and medallist Fergus Henderson is looking on.

The medallist list and other information from 1985 can be found here.

1986: Looking wider

1986 was a relatively uneventful year, but one in which strong growth continued. Until now the national ceremonies had always been near the centres of population, namely Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. In 1986 it was decided to experiment with a move to Adelaide. The guest of honour was a highly respected South Australian, former Chief Justice and now Governor, Dame Roma Mitchell, and the venue was Bonython Hall, the building where graduations take place at the University of Adelaide. Because this building is large, compared to our audience, there was a rather quiet feeling, but this did not detract from the knowledge that the AMC was continuing to grow in stature.

The ceremonies had developed into highly tuned events, ably directed by Sally Bakker and the staff. Part of the regimen was the rehearsal and I am shown above directing operations during this phase.

The Olympiad teams had also become highly visible at these events, with team members wearing their national blazers rather than school uniforms. An example is the presentation above, where Dame Roma presents a medal to Canberra-based IMO team member Ben Robinson.

A significant feature was the first appearance of young Terence Tao, a local 10-year-old prodigy, whose ability was not yet widely understood. Young Terry put his stamp on the event by not only writing the Senior paper, but winning a medal to boot.

The medallist list and other information from 1986 can be found here.

An emerging theme was the stream of visitors to Australia to observe our operations. Above Professor Alain Bouvier, Director of a teacher training institute (IREM) in Lyon, is seen relaxing at Peter O'Halloran's home. To systematise the French translation, Alain agreed to organise this by his staff in Lyon.

The French were continuing their general interest. In 1986 we received a special visit by Christian Holville of French Polynesia, and Peter O'Halloran and I are seen with him above in the office, which still just comprised two narrow rooms near our offices.

1987: AMF Limited

The AMC had not been an incorporated body, yet had a bank account. And the laws on what sort of organisation could have a bank account had tightened. We had to become incorporated in some way for this and other reasons. After legal advice the decision was to establish a company limited by guarantee, with members, not a proprietary company with shareholders. This was considered the most appropriate for a not for profit, as we were. After much debate about the articles, all was agreed and AMF Limited was set up during the year. The "F" stood for "Foundation".

There were originally 8 members, 7 of us being CCAE employees and AMC manager Sally Bakker. Five were from disciplines within the Information Sciences School, one from Education and the other from the Computer Centre. The full membership was

• Peter O'Halloran (Chairman, Mathematics)
• Sally Bakker (Secretary)
• Warren Atkins (Education)
• Peter Brown (Mathematics)
• David Clark (Computing)
• David Pederson (Statistics)
• Peter Taylor (Mathematics)
• Bob Thompson (CCAE Computer Centre)

We all had distinct roles. Warren and I were Deputy Chairman and Chairman, respectively, of the Problems Committee. Peter Brown was Treasurer, David Pederson had edited our annual Solutions and Statistics book since the death of Jo Edwards, David Clark supervised the computer programs, and Bob Thompson was our interface with the Computer Centre, on which we critically relied.

This original Board of AMF Limited is photographed above, front Sally Bakker, Peter Brown, Peter O'Halloran, Peter Taylor, back, David Pederson, David Clark, Warren Atkins, Bob Thompson.

The medallist list and other information from 1987 can be found here. This year involved further geographical exploration to Brisbane for the medal awarding ceremony and a perfect score in the Senior Division by an 11-year-old Terry Tao, in addition to other talent discovery.

1988: Further dimensions

The year 1988, even for AMF members, was dominated by hosting of the IMO in Canberra for the first time. I will be telling that story elsewhere in Chapter 4. I had become a member of AMOC as a representative of AMF, and through my association with Peter, being in an adjacent office and many conversations, was well aware of AMOC happenings in the past, I was looking forward to attending it and maybe helping.

But IMO coincided too closely with ICME-6, to be held in Hungary. Peter couldn't attend this conference, where he had founded the WFNMC in ICME-5 in Adelaide in 1984, due to the intense commitment for IMO. He wanted me to fly the Australian flag in Budapest instead, and I went there with three Canberra CAE colleagues, including Warren Atkins. I missed all of IMO except the early part when some leaders were arriving.

In Peter's absence ICME proved a major experience for me. I had been delegated to co-chair the topic study group on competitions, which involved basically calling for tasks, setting the program and convening the sessions. This was done before email was established, even for us at Universities.

Above is the official photo of the competitions group. It may have been a sign of the times but the Australians are the only ones wearing ties. There is Warren Atkins, front centre, Malcolm Brooks over his right shoulder, and I am further back towards the left of the group. Alexander Soifer, later President of WFNMC is to be seen right in front and to the right of Warren as seen. Behind Warren's left shoulder is France's most famous IMO leader and IMO Advisory Board Chairman Claude Deschamps, and to Claude's left (right as we view) is the very highly regarded East German Wolfgang Engel, from Rostock. Among others are Erica Keogh (Zimbabwe), left, second row back, and third row back is George Berzsenyi (USA) left and John Webb (South Africa on his left). Tony Gardiner (UK) is directly behind Warren and in the rear right Ed Barbeau (Canada) stands out in a white shirt.

Gilah Leder, earlier referred to as a collaborator with Jo Edwards was at the conference. I hadn't known her very well and in Jo's absence our research program had become inert. I spent some time with Gilah and we began a partnership which resurrected the research program. Gilah and I, often with other AMF colleagues, wrote a number of papers over the next few years, often in refereed journals, and attracting ARC money. The AMC data base was massive and many researchers wanted access to it, but we were very careful about it and wanted to supervise closely any research on it to ensure quality.

The other major development was the International Mathematics Tournament of Towns. This was a really high quality event, where students could participate in an international tournament in their town without travel expenses. This had been founded in the Soviet Union in 1979 to give broad access. It had great problems, using the enormous imagination and creativity of Russian teachers. Until 1988 this event was confined to the Soviet bloc countries and unknown in the West.

The Russians asked two great Bulgarian mathematicians in Petar Kenderov and Jordan Tabov to hunt out Australians running the AMC at ICME and talk us into introducing it to the West. I became life-long friends of both Jordan and Petar and in fact with Jordan became joint author of a number of books.

What they were posing to me though was a major challenge. What little I could see of the event was of high potential for us in Australia.

On return to Australia I discussed this with Mike Newman and Laci Kovacs, two ANU researchers who for many years had run a Friday night program for talented students at the ANU. They felt that the sessions could do with new focus, but originally Mike was concerned about the problem difficulty. On further review Mike decided that we should try it. My colleague Malcolm Brooks and I formed a new version of the program in partnership with Mike and Bob Bryce. We invited AMC prizewinners and for many years these proved a very popular program. Malcolm and I and later Andrei Storozhev, and some ex-IMO students at the ANU took the classes, but in recent years have handed this on to mathematicians at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation.

To me there was a need to translate the past questions. The Russians could only supply me the past questions in Russian, on very thin pieces of paper, sometimes difficult to read. I could not find anyone prepared to translate these questions. In the end I decided I could teach myself how to do it. I quickly mastered the characters, and then after procuring a copy of the official Russian English mathematical dictionaries which had been developed in a project of the American Mathematical Society and Soviet Academy of Sciences and another general Russian dictionary I discovered I could translate the problems. By luck a Canberra CAE academic Nic Hassanoff obtained approval to run a first year course in Russian Reading. This extended my confidence with Russian language generally, to the extent that I could also speak adequate tourist Russian. So the AMF started producing in English language the authenticated past papers in a series of books. We had a commercial agreement and paid royalties on sales to the Russian organisers who had developed the intellectual property.

In October 1988 an Australian committee to administer the tournament was set up, with the help of the AMF.The original committee is shown above, from left Geoff Ball (University of Sydney), Rob Welsh (Canberra Grammar School), Malcolm Brooks (Canberra CAE), Peter Taylor (Canberra CAE), Mike Newman (ANU), Phil Young (Belconnen High School), Peter O'Halloran (Canberra CAE).

In November of 1988 Canberra became the first city outside the Socialist Bloc to enter the Tournament. It is now rather widely known in the West, and even in Australia, towns which have participated have produced a greater number of IMO team members than might otherwise have been the case, particularly Canberra, Hobart (through David Paget) and Perth (through Greg Gamble and Jamie Simpson).

A history and general presentation of the origins of the Tournament can be found here. I would note that there are two problems posed as example problems of the tournament. These are both beautiful problems which can be made accessible to talented school students and motivate them. When I translated the chameleon question into English the very statement challenged me. It was a great feeling to discover the solution, to what I believe is one of the world's great mathematics problems.

The AMC continued to grow in 1988 and the medallist list and other information from this year can be found here.

1989: Growth continues

The AMC continued to grow in 1989 and the medallist list and other information from this year can be found here.

1990: WFNMC1 in Canada

The AMC also continued to grow through 1990 and the medallist list and other information from this year can be found here.

But the highlight for those fortunate enough to attend was the first WFNMC Conference held at the University of Waterloo under the initiative of Canada's Ron Dunkley.

A few competition people had been together at the founding of WFNMC at ICME-5 in Adelaide, and a stronger collegial atmosphere had developed at ICME-6 in Budapest, but here they had the whole week to themselves, and most agreed it was the best conference of any type they had attended.

I co-presented one of the plenary lectures with Jordan Tabov (Bulgaria, left, above) and Nikolay Konstantinov (USSR, centre) on the birth of the Tournament of Towns.

One of the main memories is of the several talks given by Alexander Soifer (USA), later a President of WFNMC and Tony Gardiner (UK) and apparent rivalry between them. On one occasion there was the best ad lib interjection I have heard at a lecture. Alexander announced he had caught the Erdos disease and was now offering prizes, in the form of personal cheques, to people who could solve unsolved problems he set, and duly announced one he said would be worth $20. Tony brought the house down by interjecting with the observation that he had not apparently contracted the disease too badly.

Above is the official photo of the gathered attenders. Nikolay Konstantinov (USSR) is centre front standing and on his immediate left is Peter O'Halloran. Behind Nikolay's right shoulder, with silver hair is wonderful Cuban mathematician Luis Davidson.