An eleventh-grader from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ostap Gishchak, scored the maximum points and took gold in the individual competition at the MEMO International Mathematics Olympiad, which took place in late August in Chemnitz, Germany; the Ukrainian national team also came first in the team competition.
An eleventh-grader from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ostap Gishchak, scored the maximum points and took gold in the individual competition at the MEMO International Mathematics Olympiad, which took place in late August in Chemnitz, Germany; the Ukrainian national team also came first in the team competition.
As reported by the KNU in its official post, the 19th MEMO took place on August 25–30 in Chemnitz and brought together 66 schoolchildren from 11 Central European countries. In addition to the absolute triumph in the individual competition, the Ukrainian team became the strongest in terms of the sum of team results, confirming the class of training of young mathematicians.
The Ukrainian team consisted of eight participants: Ostap Gishchak, Volodymyr Pryhunov, Kateryna Sydorenko, Mykhailo Shtandenko, Mykola Kobzarenko, Viktoriya Honcharenko, Maryna Chygidina, and Daria Balan. They formed the «skeletons» of the team, which went through individual rounds with difficult tasks and a separate team stage, where the coordination and speed of the collective solution were important.
An absolute victory in the individual competition at MEMO is a rare result, which means flawless or close to it performance of the competition tasks. For a UFML high school student, this is also an important step in the international ranking of Olympiad athletes, because MEMO is traditionally considered a high-level «interseasonal» tournament before the next selections for European and world competitions.
This year’s team success is not limited to individual «gold». The team event in MEMO is a separate discipline that requires the ability to quickly divide tasks, coordinate approaches, and check each other’s proofs. It was at this stage that the Ukrainians broke away from their competitors, which brought the team first place.
The Middle European Mathematical Olympiad is an annual competition for schoolchildren from Central Europe, launched in 2007. Participants take part in two formats: an individual round (classic Olympiad problems in number theory, combinatorics, geometry, and algebra) and a team round, where communication and consistent proofs are tested. Ukraine is consistently among the tournament favorites, and victories at MEMO traditionally become a «litmus» of our teams' readiness for subsequent international starts.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how the Ukrainian youth team won in Warsaw, where the 67th European Go Congress 2025 was held — a kind of intellectual game Olympiad, which traditionally lasts two weeks and combines a complex of events and tournaments.
