Phl wins 3 bronzes in international math tilt

MANILA, Philippines - Three young Filipino math wizards won three bronze medals in the 52th International Math Olympiad (IMO), regarded by the world’s educators as the most prestigious and toughest math olympiad for high schools students, in Amsterdam last week.

Winning a bronze each for the country were Henry Jefferson Co Morco of Chiang Kai Shek College, Vance Eldric Go of St. Jude Catholic School, and Carmela Antoinette Sio Lao, also of St. Jude Catholic School.

Lao is entering the Massachusettes Institute of Technology in Boston this September to take up a double degree studies in math and chemical engineering.

Lao had ended the Philippines’ 21-year medal drought from the IMO when she won a silver medal in last year’s 51st IMO in Astana, Kazakhstan.

The bronze medal is her second from the IMO.

While this year’s harvest of medals only involved bronze medals, this resulted in a collective higher score for the Philippines.

This year, the Philippines’ country ranking is now 54th up from 74th in 2010. The 54th ranking out of 100 countries is the highest the Philippines got in 18 years.

Morco, a senior in Chiang Kai Shek, also bagged one of the two “honorable mention” awards in last year’s IMO in Kazakhstan.

Two of the country’s five delegates to this year’s IMO — Kenneth Tan Co of Philippine Science High School-Main Campus in Quezon City and Russelle Guadalupe — also posted a score equivalent to an “honorable mention” but was not awarded for unknown reasons.

The first and only time the Philippines won a silver medal, the highest medal it has so far attained in the IMO, was way back 1989 when Jerome Khohayting won it in the 30th IMO in Germany.

The IMO is the oldest, most prestigious, and most difficult of all mathematics competitions for high school students and is considered as the “World Cup” of mathematics contests.