Maths Olympiad Update

Scaling accelerated mathematics in Ireland

A lot of people have been asking me about how The Fitzwilliam project to fundraise for the Irish Mathematics Olympiad has been going.

The short answer is: extremely well.

If you are reading this blog, you may have already seen the news that the payments company Stripe has just been announced as the new title sponsor of the Irish Maths Olympiad (IrMO). This is a commitment for at least three years. You can see some media coverage of this here: Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, and RTÉ. The Irish Mathematical Trust also has a blog post about it. This makes a lot of sense: Stripe is involved in a wide range of projects to support talented Irish youth in science and technology, including the Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, Patch, and the Immersive Software Engineering course at the University of Limerick.¹

In addition to funding, I know that many on the Stripe team in Ireland come from competitive maths and programming backgrounds, and I anticipate they will be able to provide logistical support to scale IrMO significantly. I am grateful for all of this, and very pleased with how it all turned out.

But it doesn’t end there! There are also two other sponsors which have made significant multi-year commitments: the venture capital fund Nebular, and the fund manager Abbey Capital. Nebular and Abbey have also both been great friends of science and innovation in Ireland.²

The immediate fundraising target was exceeded by a wide margin. The total amount of funding for olympiad-level mathematics for young people in Ireland has essentially tripled.

In many ways, it is a national embarrassment that this was so easy to do. I still think more people should have blogs, and express their straightforward opinions about what should be done to make the world better.

There were also many individual donors who contributed. I would especially like to thank Mark Cummins, Andrew and Emma Waldron Chen, and Luke Byrne. They had a range of small and medium donations, including from Dan Wang, Kelsey Piper, Harry O’Brien, Aness Qawlaq, Dan Schulz, Brian O’Mahony and John Loeber. There were quite a few others who donated anonymously, or for whom I couldn’t find contact details. Thank you to the countless people who retweeted, restacked, and otherwise shared the original post. I was very touched by the level of support.

Here are the new efforts being undertaken:

1. The top ~25 students in the IrMO form the ‘squad’, from which the six people who represent Ireland at the IMO are chosen. There will now be five squad training camps happening per year, and for a larger group.

2. The senior maths enrichment classes (ages 16–18) are now also being run in the spring semester, not just the autumn. In future years, it will scale to more locations. I will also note that the maths enrichment lecture notes are pretty good, and worth a perusal in themselves.

3. Previously, junior maths enrichment (ages 12–16) only took place in UCD and UCC. Seven new centres are opening for it in January: in Waterford (SETU), Tralee (MTU), Thurles (MIC), the University of Galway, Maynooth University, Sligo and Letterkenny (ATU). Limerick and Belfast are in the works; I’m not aware of any maths olympiad activities currently happening in Northern Ireland.³

4. Probably other things to follow!

I have a few other points to make about the Irish Maths Olympiad:

• I didn’t even realise until after the original post was published that, in 2025, Ireland’s performance in the International Maths Olympiad (IMO) was the best it has ever been by an incredibly wide margin. The Irish team scored 50% more points than ever before, and jumped up 25 places in the international ranking. We previously ranked closely with such scientific powerhouses as Trinidad and Tobago. Anca Mustata wrote a moving write-up of the Irish participation this year – I particularly like the annual pranksterist tradition of comparing flags with the Ivory Coast team. Anca’s blog post also has testimonials from the team about how valuable they found the enrichment classes.

• If you would like to read other testimonials about how the enrichment classes and squad training have changed the lives of many young people in Ireland, we compiled some of them into a document, which you can read here.

• Many of the expenses involved in students participating in training camps and international maths competitions have been getting paid out-of-pocket by the instructors for years.

• I only later learned that Ireland has been routinely declining invitations to international maths competitions, for lack of funds to pay for flights and administrative expenses. Thank you to David Yu⁴ and SPARC for providing a backup emergency funding valve; Ireland should never have to decline participation again.

• If you have the ability to teach olympiad-level mathematics to teenagers in Ireland and would like to do so – especially if your institution doesn’t already host enrichment classes – please email neil.dobbs@ucd.ie. I am unsure what level one needs to be at to be a useful instructor, but for myself, I’ve been taking a Louis Armstrong “if you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know” philosophy.

• I sense that the other STEM olympiads in Ireland are even more underresourced, but I haven’t been able to find out too much about them. If I understand correctly, the sum total of training that Irish participants in the International Olympiad in Informatics receive is a few weeks of classes at University College Cork. The maths olympiad folks are not tetchy about how strictly to define “mathematics”, and it would be cool to have a setup in which (for example) there would be maths classes in the morning paired with computing classes in the afternoon.

We also got a few questions about whether donations to the Irish Mathematical Trust (the charity that coordinates the olympiad activities) are tax-deductible. Generally speaking, if an organisation is not a 501c3, Americans have to pay tax on a donation to it, but for international charities, this can be circumvented by first donating to a donor-advised fund, which then redistributes to the charity in question. We’ve now worked out a system by which donations from the US, the UK, and Australia are eligible for tax-deductibility and/or gift aid. The savings are only worth the administrative expenses for donations with a present value of €1,000 or more; please email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com for more information.

As for how I’m feeling about this personally, this experience, like many things in life, reminded me of Tyler Cowen’s blog post on the high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations. Many of the most high-leverage things you can do seem to have the flavour of “convincing people that much more ambitious versions of their idea are possible”. I hope that the chain of aspiration-raising for what Ireland can achieve in these areas continues.

So, does the maths olympiad still need more money? By my sketchy napkin calculations, even after this project, Ireland will still be spending ~3x less than the UK per capita on olympiad-level mathematics. I would still like to see a lot more being done in this area, but it will also take time to scale. For that reason, I think multi-year funding commitments and logistical support would be especially helpful going forward. You can email neil.dobbs@ucd.ie about that, and CC sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com if I can be of help.

One illuminating anecdote is that Ireland has some of the best scores in the entire world on the PISA exams, but with a lower standard deviation. Irish 15-year-olds are among the highest-performing in the world, on average, but for various reasons, the conversion into elite scientific and technological achievement is fairly disappointing. That is worthy of an essay in itself, but I should clarify that the Irish Maths Trust is unlikely to endorse my socio-political navel-gazing.

I hope this project was just the beginning, and if there is more that I can do to help, please email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com. Also, if you know of other high-leverage donation opportunities in Ireland, please email me. Thank you all for your support – beir bua!

1. This was originally announced on October 9th, at an event to commemorate the opening of Stripe’s new European headquarters. However, the news got buried, because there were many other pieces of news originating from that event, including that the taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin had a fireside chat with John Collison in which he expressed encouragingly YIMBY viewpoints about the role of the planning and the courts system in slowing down construction in Ireland. As the kids say: 👀

2. I first met Finn Murphy, the General Partner at Nebular, when I was 17 and he was the mentor for my team during Patch. I can’t stress enough that Ireland is very small. Thank you Finn!

3. The complicated history of whether Northern Irish people play on the Irish, British, or either team, depending on the sport, is worthy of a Fitzwilliam post in itself. Northern Irish students who qualify for the IMO get to choose.

4. Following the chain of recommendations, David is now an Emergent Ventures winner (congrats!) to fund his camps supporting talented Taiwanese youth. I hope that Karina will follow my recommendation to be an instructor there so that she can teach the definitive class on the history of TSMC.