The IMO: About Talent, Fun, and Math Circles

Some eight years ago, I described in [33, 34] the International Mathematical Olympiad (usually abbreviated as IMO) from the perspective of the jury consisting of all team leaders, who select and translate the problems, grade the submitted work, and establish the final results. That NAW article closed with the words: “I think it would be an excellent challenge to bring the IMO to the Netherlands. . . . Who will help?” Well, it got that far. This summer, the Netherlands hosts IMO 2011 [3, 5], a mathematics competition without equal, with participants from more than one hundred countries. However, it would be shortsighted to view the IMO as just a (large and difficult) mathematics competition. So, what else is there?