About

Wishing you all a very Happy Pi Day, 2022! It’s 3/14, the day to celebrate one of the most renowned constants in mathematics.

On this mathspicious occasion, we are announcing a Mathematics Article Writing Contest! All students are invited to participate, irrespective of their department or discipline. We want this to be an opportunity for you to share your thoughts and perspective on mathematics. Due to our limited resources, we are restricting the nature of these articles to two broad categories.

  1. Math explainers: delve deep into one particular facet of mathematics, perhaps some interesting and innovative way of solving a problem, and explain what you know.
  2. Math beyond: show how mathematics is involved in or applies to a different subject, maybe in some unexpected way.

We want to emphasize that these articles should be comprehensible by a broad audience, and presented in a way that a +2 student would be able to understand and appreciate. The best five submissions will be published on our website; besides, we have exciting (perhaps unusual) prizes in store! The first, second, and third ranked participants will receive Rs. 314, Rs. 265, and Rs. 159 respectively. Rest assured that your article will be judged in a fair and objective manner by a panel of our own professors.

The contest officially closes on 31 March 15 April.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Our winners

We extend our heartiest congratulations to our winners.

  1. Bharath Krishna S, IISER Thiruvananthapuram - TIKI TAKA with Catalan Numbers
  2. Swastik Patnaik, IISER Mohali - Going around in circles: Counting circular permutations with repeated objects is not as easy as it looks!
  3. Sougata Panda, CMI - π AND 22/7 with its cousins and origin
  4. Rohan Didmishe, IISER Kolkata - Circles to Numbers
  5. Soumya Das Gupta, CMI - Cyclones, Milkweeds and Hedgehogs

You can find all of their articles on our website.

Rules and guidelines

  1. Keep your article’s word count around 1000-1500 words. Do not exceed 1500 words.
  2. Type up your article as a Word document/pdf. If you’re using LaTeX, please hold on to the source files; we might ask for them later if we intend to publish your article.
  3. Send in your article to maths.club@iiserkol.ac.in, with the subject Submission: Article Writing Contest ‘22 by the end of this month, i.e. the deadline for submission is 15 April.
  4. Make sure to supply references!
  5. Including relevant diagrams/images is encouraged.
  6. Keep it simple; the goal is to present an interesting topic in a way that a broad audience can understand and appreciate.
  7. Do not present any offensive/political/off-topic content.
  8. Do not plagiarize content.
  9. Collaboration is allowed, but no more than 3 articles per person will be accepted.

Judging and prizes

  1. All submissions will be judged by a panel of judges, consisting of professors from DMS.
  2. Each submission will be awarded points based on the following criteria.
    • Lucidity of prose
    • Creativity of presentation
    • Novelty of topic
    • Mathematical content/correctness
    • Significance/application of topic
      Submissions will then be ranked based on their total score.
  3. The top three contestants will be awarded Rs. 314, Rs. 265, and Rs. 159.
  4. The top five articles will be published on our website.