This Friday, Unicamp hosted the award ceremony for 254 medalists of the Brazilian Public School Mathematics Olympiad (Obmep) for Regional SP05 (one of eight regions in São Paulo). 30 teachers and nine schools were also awarded. Obmep is a project aimed at Brazilian public and private schools, carried out by the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (Impa), with the support of the Brazilian Mathematics Society (SBM) and promoted with resources from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science , Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC). The 2018 edition attracted more than 18 million students from the 6th year of elementary school to the last year of high school, across the country.
“Of the 18 million students, 5% passed to the second phase, from which the gold, silver and bronze medalists emerged, as well as the honorable mentions”, says Laura Rifo, who is coordinator of Regional SP05, professor at the Institute of Mathematics , Statistics and Scientific Computing (Imecc) at Unicamp and researcher at the Center for Mathematical Sciences Applied to Industry (CeMeai). “The Regional involves almost 70 municipalities and around 1.000 schools. Obmep has reached a size that is even scary – we had to correct 20 thousand tests for the second phase – but as it has been 15 years, the logistics are working well.”
Laura Rifo explains that the objective is to disseminate and awaken a taste for mathematics through solving problems that do not require content or formulas, but simply good ideas that allow them to be solved. “All public school students participate, even those who don’t like the subject so much. The competition is particularly important for Unicamp, which has just created the entrance exam for Olympic medalists. At Imecc, all vacancies were filled, in the undergraduate and bachelor's degrees and also in the mathematics course. I went to talk to this year’s freshmen and noticed several eyes shining with happiness: they were Obmep medalists.”
For the Unicamp professor, another important aspect are the additional projects that are part of Obmep, which are not limited to the competition. “We have a scientific initiation project for medal-winning students, and those from 2018 already have classes this year, on Saturdays, with a scholarship for driving and other expenses. Also on Saturdays, eighth and ninth grade students, most from public schools in the region, can participate in Poti – Olympic Intensive Training Center for the next mathematics competitions. The impact of the project on teaching is enormous and, in each school with a medalist, the others are encouraged. A student from Monte Mor has already won gold in three editions. Suddenly, when we don’t even expect it, these brilliant minds appear.”
Unicamp offered the winners several activities around the campus, such as workshops, a visit to the Exploratory Science Museum and the lecture “Mathematical Balbúrdias”, presented by professor Lúcio Tunes dos Santos, from Imecc. “The title is a small joke with the situation we are experiencing in the country, but it is an introductory lecture to show mathematics not only as a tool for solving problems, but also as a language capable of formulating and interpreting phenomena in different areas of knowledge. I will include several themes, such as cryptography, aircraft design and even cinema, as special effects increasingly require equations.”
Professor Teresa Atvars, representing rector Marcelo Knobel at the ceremony, highlighted the moment as the completion of another stage of Unicamp's social mission. “The public university, which will fight to remain public and free, has this mission of incorporating students from the network into its educational projects, which are transformative – it is its ability to help transform society by educating people. This awards event is recognition of the work and effort of each of you in the challenge that is mathematics, a science that is sometimes misunderstood, but extremely useful in all areas of science. Today I am vice-rector of Unicamp, but I was once a high school teacher, in the evening course of the second 'least loved' science, which is chemistry. I know how difficult it is to teach, from seven to eleven at night, these 'boring' sciences, which are actually spectacular.”
