WIS at South East Asian Mathematics Competition (SEAMC)

On 2 March, 9 students and 2 teachers (Ambrose Lee, Sunny Choi, Pearl Ng, Jon Cheah, Tiffany Chung, Jocelyn Tsui, Bryan Lee, Ethan Saw, Hywel Cheng, Mr Betteridge and Ms Tsui), went to Jakarta, Indonesia, to represent West Island School in the 2017  South East Asian Mathematics Competition (SEAMC), which was hosted by British School Jakarta. There were a total of 318 mathematicians and 106 teams (including SEAMCPlus) participating in the “most prestigious maths competition in the world”, for secondary/high schools.

The competition consisted of 5 rounds, with 4 rounds where we had to work in our teams of 3. Aside from the rounds involving our schools, in order to keep us all busy over the 2 days, we were given ‘long term questions’ on the first day to work on with randomly selected buddy teams; made up of students from all competing schools. We would like to congratulate Jocelyn Tsui for winning 2nd place for the buddy team rounds.

SEAMC was a fun and challenging experience for us, as it exercised our mathematical knowledge in a global environment. It also allowed us to make new connections with many other similar students across Asia. This competition really helped us improve our mathematical skills especially in solving abstract and challenging problems.

We would like to thank Mr Betteridge and Ms Tsui for all their kind support and patience throughout the course of the SEAMC competition. We would also like to thank Bruce Xu and Zarah Tesfai for training us in the weeks/months before the competition. Finally, thank you British School Jakarta and the SEAMC association for making this event happen.

Ethan Saw (9S1)