How a team of Brown students hosted a math olympiad for 250 high schoolers

On Saturday night, around 250 high school students filed into MacMillan Hall for the closing ceremony of the inaugural Brown University Math Olympiad. 

The tournament, organized by a team of over 50 Brown students, took place on campus between April 4 and 5 and welcomed over 40 teams from high schools across the country to compete in three rounds of math problems.

To an auditorium abuzz with anticipation and math jargon, Carnegie Mellon Professor of Mathematical Sciences Po-Shen Loh kicked off the awards ceremony by applauding the efforts of the BrUMO team before diving into a lecture on Euler’s number.

“It’s incredible when people choose to do something like this,” Loh said. “This is what makes the entire ecosystem work in the United States math circuit.”

The competition consisted of an individual round, a team round and a guts round — a fast-paced round featuring short-answer questions.

“It was a ton of fun,” Muztaba Syed, a high school senior from Lexington High School in Massachusetts, said at the ceremony. They asked “really high quality questions … and overall (it was) really well organized.”

Sarah Bao ’26, the founder and tournament director of BrUMO, recalls competing in “similar competitions in high school” organized by universities like Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology. When she arrived at Brown as a first-year, she had the idea that Brown should host a math competition too. But, “at the time, I didn’t really have any leverage to do anything because I didn’t know anyone,” Bao said.

Bao officially began the project last summer with support from the Applied Math Departmental Undergraduate Group. The original team of around 20 students grew to 50 at the start of this semester with groups split across logistical planning and problem writing, she said.

“I was surprised that so many people were interested in hosting a math competition,” Bao said. She cited the lack of “annual, big events that people can get involved in” within the math departments at Brown as a potential reason for why around a whopping 80 students applied to be a part of the team.

“I feel like people might expect the math scene at Brown to be a little smaller than at other schools. But from this experience, I realized that that is not true,” Bao added.

Jake Rosenberg ’28, a problem writer on the BrUMO team, said he joined the organization in search of a “math community at Brown,” something he “hadn’t really found” prior to joining the team. Working alongside students who were equally passionate about math “allowed me to let a different part of myself shine,” Rosenberg said. 

Leading up to the competition, the problem-writing meetings involved a lot more of “us working together as a group,” Amber Bajaj ’28, a lead problem writer, said. “We all have different backgrounds, so it was really nice to get everyone’s input.”

For Bao, the hardest part of the planning process was projecting registration numbers. “We have to plan a competition without knowing how many people want to come,” she said. During the group’s first registration cycle, they “fell really short” of their 250-competitor target. Their logistics lead, Neal Frankenberg ’28, “basically sat down and went and looked for every single Massachusetts math teacher’s contact and sent out emails to all of them,” Bao said. 

In the end, “seven or eight (teams) were from Rhode Island,” Frankenberg said. Other teams traveled to College Hill from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and California.

“I feel like Rhode Island has a really tight-knit math community,” said Iris Yang, a junior from Barrington High School. “So BrUMO was a nice way to connect with (students from) other states.” 

For Sophia Gao, another member of the Barrington High School Math Team, BrUMO stood out from other math competitions because “it’s close to home.” 

“Being here for a math competition and knowing that it’s my home state, I feel kind of proud,” Gao said.

Frankenberg emphasized that this year’s tournament marked the beginning of a longer-term initiative. In addition to having more Rhode Island teams compete, “we’d love to see change in the future by helping establish an actual math commission within Rhode Island,” Frankenberg said. 

Looking ahead, Bao emphasized her commitment to differentiating BrUMO from other competitions by accommodating different experience levels and introducing more unique events.

“There’s a lot of value in having high schoolers who really enjoy math visit Brown and interact with the math community,” Bao said. She hopes that students can leave the competition “potentially wanting to come to Brown to study math.”

In two years, Gao “definitely” sees herself pursuing applied math in college, potentially at Brown. For Syed, who is headed to college in a few months, attending BrUMO has made him “want to run competitions of my own.”