Save the Irish Maths Olympiad!

The importance of gifted education

[Edit: this situation has changed completely, please read the update post!]

TL;DR: The Irish Mathematics Olympiad (IrMO) is running extremely low on funds. What is essentially the only elite intellectual training for teenagers on the island of Ireland is about to be scaled back for lack of what is, for many readers of this blog, a trivial amount of money.¹ The Fitzwilliam has a side project to save it, and you can donate here.

When I was in secondary school, my best friend and I signed up for just about every science, maths and academic extra-curricular it was theoretically possible for an Irish teenager to do. The one with the biggest logistical hassle, by far, was that I used to spend my Saturdays commuting five hours to University College Dublin for mathematics enrichment classes. This was to train for the Irish Mathematics Olympiad (IrMO), the national competition to decide which six teenagers will be sent to represent Ireland in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO).² I didn’t grow up anywhere particularly remote: the commute was so long because the classes only run in six locations on the entire island.

Even at the time, the enrichment classes seemed remarkably under-resourced to me. The point is not to moan about this blemish on my otherwise fairly idyllic upbringing. The point is that there are large swathes of the country from which these training classes are inaccessible. While science competitions can be good and worthwhile, the enrichment classes are, to the best of my knowledge, essentially the only elite continuous academic training for teenagers in Ireland.³ It’s not that I’ve ever been single-mindedly obsessed with mathematics: I think the classes were so impactful on me because it was a revelation to study anything rigorously.

To be blunt, the reason why the maths olympiad hasn’t expanded is that it is run by a bunch of mathematicians. They don’t know anybody, and they are terrible at asking for money.

Three weeks ago, I started reconnecting with my old contacts in that world, to see if I could help them. Around the same time, entirely by coincidence, their main sponsor withdrew. Thanks to my friend Mark Cummins, we raised enough to stop the existing programmes that students were already signed up to from being cancelled. But the operation is still extremely barebones.

The Irish Maths Olympiad is bizarrely under-resourced compared to similar programmes in other countries. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but I believe the British are spending at least an order of magnitude more per capita. When I mentioned some of Ireland’s current funding struggles at an event with several IMO medalists last week, at first they didn’t believe me.

I’ve heard a few people express scepticism of olympiads, because they think that pure maths research is not very socially important. If olympiads nudge even a tiny number of the brightest students away from entrepreneurship or other ventures toward entirely theoretical research, then the net effect on society could be negative. I won’t express a view on the social utility of mathematics research per se, except to say that there are so many steps between bright kids getting exposed to challenging mathematics for the first time, and becoming academics. Only one friend I made from my olympiad days is on track to become a mathematician. And at the very least, the olympiad classes are fun, and not the usual soul-sucking, creativity-draining experience of secondary school maths for students who have a natural aptitude for it (as well as those who don’t!). It also helps the students find friends and collaborators. As for whether saving olympiads is cost-competitive with the most effective giving opportunities, I don’t know. Groups like Open Philanthropy Project have donated to camps including ESPR, which recruits heavily from the world of olympiads. That suggests the effective altruists think highly of this kind of thing. It would also be great if the Irish olympiads served as a pipeline for us to get more applicants to Patch. I don’t have space to properly defend this view here, but every time I’ve looked into it, every claimed downside of gifted education seems like cope to me.

Personally, I feel that getting young people to sit still and take challenging in-person exams is more important than ever, now that an OpenAI model can win a gold medal at the IMO. If students don’t learn skills of deep focus when they’re young, when are they going to do it?

My sense is that the other olympiads, like for chemistry, informatics, and linguistics, are even more under-resourced. They don’t even have enrichment classes. But I still don’t know much about them, and there is less of an established institution there.⁴

If my old professors knew how bad I am at maths now, they would probably be embarrassed to be associated with me. However, one thing I do think I am extremely good at is having zero sense of shame about harassing people decades older than me to get them to do things I think are important. In this case, I successfully bullied the Irish Mathematical Trust to set up a page where you can donate directly. The IMT is the charity that coordinates IrMO and the enrichment classes.⁵

If you want to talk to them about becoming a sponsor, or are having issues with the donation button, please email irishmathstrust@gmail.com or neil.dobbs@ucd.ie. Donations above €250 may have significant tax benefits from Ireland’s charitable donation scheme. If you’re planning on donating €1,000+, it may be worth it to switch to bank transfer to save on processing fees. If I can be of help or if you want to keep me in the loop, please CC sam@thefitzilliam.com. Real estate on the t-shirts worn by some of Ireland’s greatest young minds will never be so underpriced!

Also: If you are someone in Ireland with teenage children, you should get them to try out for the olympiad! The deadline for maths teachers to sign up to run round 1 of the IrMO is next week, and you can get information about attending Junior and Senior Enrichment here and here.

Why isn’t this just supported by the government? The only state funding for maths olympiads pays for the flights for the participants to go to the IMO and the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad. Gifted programmes would be funded under the “special needs” budget, which received €2.9 billion this year. I say “would”, because there literally aren’t any gifted programmes to make use of this rule.⁶ How special needs can receive so much government support, while gifted programmes receive essentially zero, is a story for another day.

I want to clarify that everything I have said in this post is in an entirely personal capacity. Perhaps the reason why this is close to my heart is that I was the marginal student: someone for whom the enrichment classes were very impactful, but who, if the programme were scaled down even more, wouldn’t have made the cut.⁷ To get the ball rolling, I have made a personal donation, as have core Fitzwilliam confidants Oisín Morrin, Neil Shevlin, Adam Kelly, and Karina Bao.

What will the extra money be used for? That is ultimately up to the IMT to decide, but I gather that the most immediate uses are:

• To expand enrichment classes to a larger number of universities, so that the commutes are less insane.

• Senior Enrichment (4th to 6th year, ages 16–18) only occurs in the autumn, and with some extra resources, the amount of content could easily be doubled, and classes also run in the spring.

• Junior Enrichment (1st to 3rd year, ages 12–16) has only existed for a few years, and could be expanded significantly.

• I would expect the instructors to continue to be volunteers, but there is currently no system in place to pay for (e.g.) hotels for a substitute instructor, or a guest speaker, etc. They make small payments to tutors, generally university students, who help out. I would expect that, at higher levels of student ability, it will become more difficult to find volunteer instructors with enough of a background in the relevant content.

• There is currently a residential camp for some of the strongest candidates for the IMO team to train with students from other countries. Only ~25 people get to experience that, and it is currently directly bottlenecked by funding.

Accounting for exactly how much the maths olympiad costs currently is a bit complicated, depending on how exactly you classify certain expenses. But, from what I understand, the entire budget for all olympiad-related expenses in Ireland is less than the salary of one modestly-paid full-time employee. That’s crazy!

My sense is that raising €100,000 would be a transformative amount of money for gifted maths education in Ireland, and has essentially been beyond their wildest dreams up until this point. Through some well-placed phone calls, we’re already about 20% of the way there. Their donation page is here, and perhaps you or someone you know will be able to help us reach the rest of the way. Many thanks to you all!

We will be back to your regularly scheduled programming soon…

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, and Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his personal blog here.

1. I said “island”: To my knowledge, no classes or events for the British Maths Olympiad take place in Northern Ireland. The “shamrock curtain” has prevented me from knowing very much about what’s going on up there, but there ought to be more cross-border cooperation, and Northern Irish kids being exposed to this without having to take a flight.

2. Yes, the acronyms are confusing for countries whose names start with I…

3. I don’t have anything against the Centre for Talented Youth Ireland, although I note that their classes are rather expensive. It’s undeniable (and also fine!) that students involved in olympiads are of a much higher academic calibre than those in CTYI.

4. My friends and I did try out for the International Linguistics Olympiad team, but considering that we learned of its existence a week before the final deadline, it was always going to be an uphill battle. If you take a look at what the problems actually look like, you’ll understand why being monolingual is not a disqualifying factor.

5. They should now also have a stand at the Stripe Young Scientist, so if you are there, come say hello. There will also be Stripe Press and Patch stands.

6. CTYI previously had a government grant, which was cut during the funding crunch of the Great Recession, and was declined to be restored. IMT previously had a grant from Science Foundation Ireland, which was not renewed.

7. Another reason why this has been on my mind recently is that we’re planning to create a sister group to the Fitzwilliam reading group, specifically to learn mathematics together, inspired by the style of maths circles. I may even be borrowing some slides and material from the enrichment classes. Unfortunately, I’m travelling a lot in the coming weeks, and our maths meetup won’t kick off until November. I greatly look forward to it.