AUBGers Win Medals at Computer Mathematics Competition
Several AUBG students, mentored by professors Hristo Iliev and Vladimir Georgiev, won medals at the eighth National Student Olympiad in Computer Mathematics in Sofia. Battulga Enkhbayar got the silver, while Stefan Solarski, Antonia Kaisheva and Milos Vukadinovic took home bronze medals Nov. 8.
The four-hour competition gathers mathematically gifted students from Bulgarian universities across the country and tests their knowledge in computer mathematics. The discipline looks at problems that are hard to solve by hand but easy to solve computationally and students have to write code to find the solutions.
“Very hard computations could have solved some of those problems,” Vukadinovic, Mathematics and Computer Science major at AUBG, said. “But it is interesting to see how engineers can get the values through computing, which is probably very useful in the real world.”
What helped the team win, Kaisheva, who plans to do a double major in mathematics and computer science, said, is that “we are friends, we hang out and discuss math topics and have this healthy mathematical environment on campus.” The students are members of Polygon, a club for math enthusiasts at AUBG that hosts math competitions on campus and co-organizes a chess tournament together with AUBG’s Psychology Club.
In addition to the opportunity to join math-related extracurricular activities on campus, the students agree that the classes at AUBG gave them a solid knowledge foundation. “The level of mathematics and computer science at AUBG is very high,” Vukadinovic said, “So even without much preparation we were able to achieve good results.”
"We have very smart and bright students,” Iliev said. “They have the potential to succeed in whatever [field] they choose. With just a little guidance on our part, they are able to produce some great results.”