This year Iran’s International Math Olympiad team came in 10th out of 100 participating countries with a team score of 151 out of 252 possible points. Our top individual scorer was Mina Dalirrooyfard who took 14th place among 564 individual contestants (of which only 10% were women). Mina came home with a gold medal. Another Iran gold winning team member was Mojtaba Shokrian Zini who placed in 39th individual place.
Top individual scorer of the Olympiad was Germany’s Lisa Sauerman with a perfect individual score of 42. German team as a group came in at 11th place just below Iran by only one point.
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China’s team came in first with 189 points, USA 2nd with 184 points, and Singapore 3rd. with 179 points. Four out USA’s six member all-male team were of Asian descent. Kuwait and UAE teams tied for last place with a team score of 1.
Above is Iran’s 2011 team at the contest ceremonies. Inset graphically shows Iran’s position in the math arena over the years. The height of the orange bar represents the number of individual contestants, and the squiggly graph line shows our placement. When it comes to math, Iran competes in the world-class league. Keep in mind that the biggest player, China, has 17 times the population of Iran, giving them a 17:1 talent pool advantage (this makes Singapore’s 3rd place accomplishment–population only about 5 million–very impressive; the famous Singapore Math method is obviousl working). By the way, China did not participate in the Taiwan 1998 Olymiad when Iran became the world champion.
