Billions of people around the globe tuned into the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, witnessing the skill and dedication displayed by some of the world’s greatest athletes competing at the highest level of sport. The Summer Olympics only happen every four years. Fortunately, there are other olympiads that are held annually—such as the International Science Olympiads (ISO).

These academic competitions bring together the most gifted and talented students from over 90 countries. The Olympiads include physics, mathematics, chemistry, informatics, and several other categories. Like the athletes at Beijing, ISO competitors devote hundreds of hours in their home countries to rigorously prepare for their Olympic competition. Together, these elite students are the vanguard of the next generation of global scientific and mathematical talent. Wolfram Research is proud to have sponsored the 50^th International Mathematical Olympiad, held this year from July 10–22 in Bremen, Germany. Hundreds of brilliant students will receive complimentary Mathematica for Students licenses for participating in this event.

The International Science Olympiads are just a few of the scores of sponsorship activities Wolfram Research undertakes each year. We sponsor many prestigious academic and scientific organizations and programs, competitions, and events worldwide. We believe that the participating students greatly benefit from having their own Mathematica licenses.

Daniel Li has participated in many such competitions, several sponsored in part by Wolfram Research. Daniel is currently at the Research Science Institute, hosted by MIT, working on a physics project with Dr. Leonid Levitov. He has been using Mathematica to run numerical simulations, helping him create and verify his conjectures. Li said, “Mathematica 7’s enhanced support for parallel computing has been helpful, as I’ve been working with some computations on very large data sets, and the new parallelization support fully takes advantage of quad-core and dual-core processors’ capabilities.”

Sway Chen, member of the 2008 U.S. Physics Team and active participant in several other competitions, said, “I use Mathematica for a lot of purposes for my classes, and its computing power never ceases to amaze me. I’m also a huge fan of Wolfram|Alpha and the way it immediately delivers answers to pretty much any query.”

Vivek Bhattacharya has participated in the USA Mathematical Olympiad and the American Regions Math League, was a Siemens silver medalist and a National Merit Scholar finalist, and was his high school class’s valedictorian. He wrote, “Mathematica has been very helpful in other modeling projects for classes and research; I am amazed by its numerical capabilities (which is stereotypically something that Mathematica is supposed to lack but clearly doesn’t…), and it is much easier to use and modify parameters with Mathematica than it is with Matlab and such.”

Our sponsorship group is always on the lookout for events that encourage students to compete in science, technology, engineering, and math—the STEM subjects. If you are participating in or organizing an event relative to these subjects, please let our Sponsorships Group know.