Past Competitions

2020

The UK University Integration Bee (back then as Cambridge Integration Bee) was started in 2020. I (Vishal) decided to make it because I'd met a few people also going to Cambridge online and we wanted to make some integral competition like the MIT one - it seemed fun. No one seemed to want to commit to do it so one day I decided to just go ahead with it - I had a lot of free time as it was lockdown and I'd always enjoyed doing integrals. I also spent some time that holiday doing some team programming competitions which inspired me to make it a team competition - it's much more fun doing things in teams than by yourself (if you get stuck you can spend the remaining time just talking to your mates). The attitude I had with competitions I entered I want people to have with the Integration Bee too - at the end of the day the aim is to have fun.

After setting up a discord server to host it, I sent out invites around various maths servers and it ended up becoming more popular than I expected - over 65 people took part from various universities like Oxford and Imperial and even from different countries like India and Sweden - not bad for a competition which was going to just be among a few friends I know.

The competition consisted of a team of up to three trying to solve as many of the 40 problems given within 2 hours. I designed it to be a longer competition as opposed to typical integration bees (like MIT) because I don't really like high speed high pressure type competitions where a mistake can cost everything. Also, it means the techniques can be a lot deeper and the problems can be more challenging so it's also a way for people to get to learn about new techniques and some theory like the Gamma function. The winners were Sharvil, Xander and Som.

2021

In 2021, I wanted to run the competition on a larger scale which I did via Cambridge's maths society, the Archimedeans, joining as events manager. I invited Warwick, Durham, Imperial and Oxford universities to take part and the organisation of the competition was through the help of many friends. The 2021 Integration Bee was sponsored by Jane Street.

Round 1 was held at Cambridge and Oxford on 17/10/2021, Imperial on 20/10/2021, Durham on 27/10/21 and Warwick on 15/10/21. Some held it online (Cambridge, Oxford) while the others were in person. Round 1 worked exactly the same as 2020's - a team of up to three trying to solve as many as the can of the 40 problems in 2 hours. The overall winning team was Sharvil, Xander and Jirayus from Cambridge. From Durham, the winning team was Jake, Harry and James, from Warwick it was George and Luke, from Oxford it was Jianrong, Tavish and Keyang and from Imperial it was Arjun, Michal and Marcos.

Round 2 was held at Cambridge on 20/11/2021 between 12pm and 6pm, for the top few teams from each university. Round 2 took a lot of inspiration from the UKMT Senior Team Maths Challenge with the Group, Crossintegral and Shuttle rounds being inspired directly from it. The Group round was identical to Round 1 but with 10 problems in 1 hour. The Crossintegral round was a crossword split into across and down clues; teams split into two with one half taking the across and the other taking down - neither side allowed to communicate other than asking for a specific question to be done. The clues sometimes depended on other answers too. The final Shuttle round kept the same split teams and there were 4 shuttles; each consisting of 4 quick problems where upon solving one, a number would be passed on to keep it going.

The winner with 110 points overall was Sharvil, Xander and Jirayus (Cambridge), 2nd place was Danilo, Ming and Julian (Imperial) who were only one point behind and 3rd place were Rishi, Rubaiyat and Adithya (Cambridge) with 102 points.

2022

In 2022, the competition expanded further with St Andrews, Manchester, UCL and Bath joining. Alfie and Finn also joined to help out with writing problems and organising the competition leading to an increase in problem variety. Beginning this year, my role in Archimedeans became just working on the integration bee. Jane Street continued to sponsor us.

Round 1 was held in person at various dates across the universities, mostly in November while Oxford's took place in January due to difficulties organising the competition earlier. Greater efforts were placed on accessibility as I’d noticed some 0 scores in previous years. This included putting the problems in difficulty order- previously part of doing well was to be able to identify which problems are difficult (this remains in Round 2’s relay!) Another change was to make the first 10 problems accessible to those who hadn’t done any integration competitions before- including a problem designed to teach differentiation under the integral sign. The final change was to reduce to 30 problems, to improve the average quality. The overall winning team in Round 1 was Dylan, Joshua and Ziyou from Cambridge, ending the streak Sharvil's team had had since the first online bee.

Due to the lateness of their Round 1, Oxford had a different set of problem which can be found in the Past Competitions link under Resources on the home page. A tiebreaker was used at some universities which can also be found there - these had the same format as a standard Round 1. At Manchester, I held an in person MIT Style Tiebreaker, there were 30 problems and each team nominated a person to do 10 problems and then moved onto the next member while tallying the scores. The format and rules were the same as MIT: a headsup round where you announce you have the answer, get it checked and if it's right, you win the round, if it's wrong then the other people get to continue attempting to solve the problem. Each problem is meant to take 2-5 minutes - I chose the time based on how hard I felt it was or extended time if no one was close to the solution.

Round 2 was held at Cambridge on 06/02/2023 between 12pm and 5:30pm, for the top few teams from each university. Round 2 was similar to 2021 except the shuttle round had been replaced by a relay round where the teams were given one problem at a time with the opportunity to skip them if they struggled too much and bonus marks (alphas and betas!) awarded for a high proportion of questions completed.

The winner with 166 points overall was Sharvil, Jirayus and Artur (Cambridge - three years in a row!), 2nd place was Dylan, Ziyou and Joshua (Cambridge) with 160 points and 3rd place was Eric, Thomas and Yiting (Imperial) with 157 points.

2023

For 2023/24, Sharvil Kesarwani and Yuepeng Alex Yang joined as problem writers, expanding our problem writing team internationally. We wrote what I think is the best set of problems for the integration bee yet! The competition also expanded internationally with the National University of Singapore joining us, hosting the competition amongst themselves in Singapore, with hope that it expands to other universities in Singapore. With this, there were over 400 participants worldwide. By this point, societies at various universities have been set up in Manchester (Competitive Integration Society) and Durham (Durham Mathematical Problem Solving Society) because of the integration bee- Durham’s is very big now and hosts many maths competitions. Despite big changes in the competition's organisation, Round 1 and 2 worked largely the same. The overall winner of Round 1 was Jirayus Jinapong by himself with a score of 29 - the 30th was a typo only from reading the question incorrectly! However in Round 2, Joshua, Dylan and Ziyou beat his team with scores of 157 vs 146.

Contact Us

If you have any enquiries at all please contact me by email.

vg354@cantab.ac.uk

@archimedeans

The Archimedeans
Center for Mathematical Sciences
Wilberforce Road
Cambridge
United Kingdom
CB3 0WA