About CAPS

CAPS is a shortcut for Czech-Austrian-Polish-Slovak Match. It is a mathematical competition in the format of the prestigious International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and serves as a preparation for the IMO teams of the respective countries, with Ukraine as a guest country. Each of these teams contains the 6 most successful students in the national mathematical olympiads.

History

CPS (Czech Polish Slovak Match) has a history going back decades. The first edition happened in 1995 with Czechia and Slovakia only; with Poland joining from 2001 on. It serves as the final preparation for the students before IMO.

Hosting CAPS at ISTA already has a long tradition. In the years 2016-2019 it was organized at ISTA by Georg Heilig of Scientific Events, and by local organizer Josef Tkadlec (a previous participant and PhD student in Chatterjee group). The Austrian team started to join in 2017. There was no competition at ISTA in 2020 and 2021 due to pandemy, but the event took place nevertheless in a virtual mode.

Since 2022 Tamas Hausel is the responsible faculty member, and the actual local organizers have been Kamil Rychlewicz (Poland), Jakub Löwit (Czechia), Daniel Holmes (Austria), Shon Ngo (Ukraine) and Lenka Kopfová (Czechia) – all PhD students at ISTA. Since 2022 the competition has also included a team from Ukraine.

Format of the competition

The competition itself consists of two separate competition sessions; on each day the students have 4.5 hours to solve 3 challenging problems. From 2024 the format requires 2 additional female competitors from each team. This way there are 8 students and 2 team leaders (often former competitors) from each country. Minimum 25% female participation is guaranteed.

The organization of the competition is done by the local organizers and the team leaders: this amounts to preparing the problems, taking care of the students, overseeing the competition and organizing the marking process. The marking process for each problem is coordinated by a jury consisting of additional volunteers from ISTA (usually PhD students and postdocs). During the award presentation, there is an additional talk by an ISTA faculty.