Hello! My name is Adam McBride. For 40 years I was on the staff at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and am now an Emeritus Professor there.

For many years I have felt that school curricula do not stretch the ablest students. For almost 50 years, I have been involved in enrichment activities, such as master-classes and Summer Schools. I have given numerous talks to groups of students and teachers. UKMT has provided the perfect environment to further these activities.

I have been involved with UKMT from its very beginning in 1996. I shall explain below how this came about. At various times I have been Vice-Chair of Council, Treasurer, Chair of the Investment Committee and Chair of BMOC/BMOS. I served on Council for two periods of nine years and was a member of the Challenges Subtrust for almost as long.

I have always relished a challenge. The word challenge will appear regularly in what follows. I shall concentrate on the two non-administrative areas with which I have been most heavily involved and which have given me much pleasure and many challenges, namely vetting competition papers and the IMO.

The Junior, Intermediate and Senior Challenges (with a capital C) are the core business of UKMT. We are blessed with wonderfully creative colleagues who, year after year, produce interesting papers. I have had the pleasure of vetting these question papers and draft solutions almost from the start. Each time I set myself the challenge of trying to do as many questions as possible in my head or with minimal use of pencil and paper. If I get to Q15 for Junior or Intermediate, the question paper is probably of the right level of difficulty, if I am still doing Q20 in my head it is probably too easy and if I get stuck at Q10 it is probably too hard.

I also vet the Grey and Pink Kangaroos and the Cayley-Hamilton-Maclaurin papers. Whereas the Challenges are marked by a machine, follow-up rounds give birth to marking weekends. Anyone who has not taken part in one of these is missing out on enjoyable occasions which combine hard work with socialising in a relaxed environment.

While many people are involved, I would like to mention Howard Groves and David Crawford who have overseen the Junior/Intermediate Challenges and the Kangaroo activities respectively for many years, producing papers of consistently high quality.

Most of my marking weekends have been in connection with BMO1/2. Around 1990, it was felt that training of the UK team for the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) should be put on a more formal footing. The British Mathematical Olympiad Committee (BMOC) was established and I was asked to be a member. I had hardly got my feet under the table when in 1993, at short notice, I was asked to take over as Leader of the UK IMO team. This was a real challenge. I had to train a group of young people who were orders of magnitude better at solving Olympiad problems than I was or ever will be. Was I worried ? Not at all. I enjoyed the experience hugely. The most exciting moment came in 1996 when we beat the Chinese team by one point. (There isn’t enough space to explain how this came about. Suffice to say that China win IMO with great regularity.)

Over 100 countries now participate in IMO but only about 20 have the infrastructure to host the annual event. A crisis arose regarding the hosting of IMO2002. The Philippines had to pull out and it was decided that the UK would come to the rescue. I was delighted that IMO2002 was held at the University of Strathclyde. By this time I was no longer the Team Leader and instead became the Chair of the Jury. UKMT funded the event, which proved a big drain on its finances from which it took time to recover. We hosted IMO again in 2019, at the University of Bath, with UKMT again making a major financial contribution, fortunately from a much stronger base. Again I was Chair of the Jury. Then another crisis arose, regarding IMO2024 which was scheduled to be held in Ukraine. When that became impossible, the UK again came to the rescue and we ran it, again in Bath, with me as Jury Chair for the third time (which, I am told, is a record in the modern history of IMO). That this happened was due almost entirely to our own Geoff Smith, until recently Chair of the IMO Board, who is now regarded as “Mr IMO” the world over.

Not many readers will know how the IMO Jury operates. It consists of the Leaders of all the competing countries, of which there were 108 in 2024. On arrival the Leaders will typically receive a booklet of 32 problems, 8 in each of Algebra, Geometry, Number Theory and Combinatorics and have 24-36 hours to try them without solutions. Once the solutions are made available, the long process of elimination begins until we arrive at the final 6 problems which form the two 4.5 hour papers on consecutive days, with just 3 questions on each. The Jury then has to approve the wording of each question in English and thereafter to approve translations into all the languages students will require, which typically number over 50. The Jury has to agree marking schemes and eventually the cut-off for medals, while also discussing general IMO matters such as future venues. The working language is English with motions translated into other languages, usually French, German and Spanish, before a vote is taken.

Anyone arriving from another planet would wonder how the system could possibly work and produce an IMO that would be remembered for all the right reasons. That’s where the Jury Chair comes in. It was an enormous challenge and one that left me exhausted but also exhilarated. I must mention again David Crawford who was my wonderful Jury assistant. On the one hand he ran the IT side of things by displaying motions and votes on the big screen. In addition the two of us spent two days at the start stuffing envelopes and folders, dealing with photocopying and moving furniture. Thank you, David. You were a tower of strength.

My role in UKMT is now restricted to the vetting of competition papers. However, I can look back on many happy experiences courtesy of UKMT and many challenges (and Challenges) successfully overcome. If there is anyone still reading this epistle who feels they want to get involved as a volunteer, please get in touch with Heather – the Trust’s Volunteering Manager. If you get even half the pleasure I have had out of volunteering, you will have a ball.