Below are a few example assignments of the Mathematics A-lympiad. For the entire collection, visit our archive.

Preliminary round 2019-2020: The middle of somewhere

Ruud lives in Warnsveld and wants to meet with Dédé who lives in the Frisian village of Wier in the north of the Netherlands. A logical place to meet would be to choose a place between their two places of residence. To determine this location, you can use an atlas to find out where Warnsveld and Wier are, but nowadays people are more likely to use apps and websites like Google Maps, 9292, the NS app or Maps.Me.
On the basis of the available connections, the travel distance or the travel time, a good meeting place for two people is easy to arrange. However, if a meeting has to be arranged between more than two people from different locations, this is more complicated – not to mention if people come from different countries or continents. This Alympiad preliminary round assignment deals with such cases.

Final 2019-2020: Just make a throw

You have probably played Yahtzee or another dice game, and thought about your choice of throwing the dice again or not. What does such a choice depend on? In this assignment, you will examine a few dice games and investigate different scoring systems and their effect on the attractiveness of the game.