07 Early AMC

1972: Arrival at CCAE and Peter O'Halloran

When I commenced work at the Canberra College of Advanced Education, one of the more senior members of the mathematics staff, Peter O'Halloran, took a lot of interest in me. In a sense you could say he became a mentor.

One could say it was a little unusual as on the surface he had no interests in common with me. He was an active family man with four children. I was a younger single person.

We would often have morning or afternoon tea together, discussing possible projects. He was about to become the first CCAE academic to take study leave. He had arranged to take six months at the Canadian firm Glass Containers, where he was to develop his skills in Operations Research, and a further period at the University of Waterloo, which Bernhard Neumann had recommended to him because of their strong department of Combinatorics, his other main interest. The following article appeared at that time in the Canberra News, which was an afternoon paper published at the time.

1973: Peter's return

In mid 1973 Peter returned, full of enthusiasm. Both of his destinations had been good, but at the University of Waterloo he had seen people running a mathematics competition for school students. This was exactly the kind of activity he was looking for.

1974 and 1975: Recruiting the Troops

Peter and I continued to spend long hours talking about this. He asked if I was prepared to be on the committee. He didn't have any trouble recruiting me. I had seen the value of school enrichment while a student in Adelaide. I was in a very large honours year, but most of the students came from two schools, schools in which a teacher at one of them ran special classes for talented students and also had them competing in a statewide competition. Whereas I had two very good mathematics teachers at school I felt the students from these two schools always had a head start. They seemed a lot more mature and adapted to things better than I felt I did. Maybe because they had seen some things before.

But I was not the only one. Peter was hunting around, further in our department, further in the University, further in the city using Peter's teacher network from being the President of the Canberra Mathematical Association. Things were ready to strike ...

1976 April 11: The first meeting

Peter had his troops in readiness and called the first meeting at his house on 11 April 1976. I remember the atmosphere very well. There was excitement in the air.

The attendees can be seen in the above agenda papers. The key three, as it turned out, would be Warren Atkins, Jo Edwards and myself, because we all worked fairly closely together at the CCAE so could convene easily. It was decided to run a competition from scratch almost immediately.

Peter, astutely, had studied the structure of the US and Canadian Competitions. The weakness of the US competition was that it was a department of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and was not independent. The Canadian one was based at the University of Waterloo, it was independent, but had been founded initially by Ralph Stanton to act as a recruiting device for the newly founded University. Waterloo was successfully recruiting the best students from all over Canada, drying up the supply of the most talented students to traditionally strong Universities. Academics from these Universities would not volunteer to help the enemy.

We were certainly going to be independent, and the CCAE was hardly a threat to any strong University, so we would be able to recruit volunteers from anywhere, in particular to start with at the Australian National University. Laci Kovacs was on the initial committee, and through the years Mike Newman, Bob Bryce and Martin Ward continued to have a strong presence, in particular on problems committees.

The organising structure in the first instance was interesting. In the first year Peter kept an eye over everything, while Warren headed the first Problems Committee and I headed an administration committee. Jo Edwards had a talented son at school so for the following year she and I traded places, with me transferring across to the Problems Committee.

1976 July: The first competition

But first we had a job to do. Warren had to get a paper ready in a couple of months. To do this, and with Waterloo's approval, he heavily leaned on material available from them. It was decided to establish high integrity, and to do this, even in the first year with limited time he took a paper through three complete rounds of moderation. This system was to pay off in the end. We have never had a serious typo or mathematical mistake in our competition and schools and students as a result have confidence in the papers.

Peter was busy getting sponsorship and he persuaded the computer company Burroughs, the mainframe supplier on our campus, to put up prize money.

But first we needed money to print the exam papers, a job too big for us to get through the CCAE printing service unnoticed. Peter decided to approach the Principal, the legendary Dr SS (Sam) Richardson for this printing approval and for encouragement in general. He decided to take me with him as a "witness". We were not sure what to expect, but Sam was kind and approved the $92 needed to print these papers. After that we got entry fees of 20 cents and we were financially viable from then on.

My job was to get the invitation letters out to the ACT schools. We just set one paper in the first two years, and this just covered years 7 to 10, so the targets were the Canberra High Schools.

We had been very nervous about our use of the word "Competition" as this was not a popular word. It had equated to "pressure" and schools in Canberra no longer had sports teams even. However to our surprise every school which was invited accepted, and we had in our first effort more than 1300 entries.

One of my main next tasks was to consign an exam number for every contestant. I spent many hours over several night sitting up in my office processing this. The following year we decided it was not needed.

There were other things going on. In line with the US and Canada, despite it not being ideal, we had designed the paper to be multi-choice, with answers indicated on sheets in pencil to be read by optical readers. No one in Canberra had readers so Peter had arranged for the scripts to be read on to magnetic tape at the University of New South Wales. This tape was to be returned to Canberra, where Rich Yorke and colleagues had written a program to enable the tape to be read on our Burroughs computer and processed.

1976: The presentation ceremony

Peter was not one to leave an aspect to chance, or to waste an opportunity. The results were out and being distributed to schools. But there was a need for a grand ceremony. Peter decided to go for the Federal Minister for Education, and he accepted. The first event was held in the newly completed 9A1 lecture theatre and Burroughs medals were awarded to the top students. These included a later to be famous mathematics professor in Ezra Getzler, from Deakin High School, who got the top score.

Peter arranged first a lunch which Senator Carrick. Our ability in the future to get important people on to the campus, and in turn get in to places like Government Houses always kept us in good favour with Sam. Sam had it in his diary as soon as the date was known.

1976: Publications

In addition to the ceremony it was decided to produce a book which included the questions, solutions, statistics and most importantly the names of the winners, which meant parents wanted them as souvenirs, as well as schools wanting the solutions for their libraries.

The sales were astronomical and gave us an independent form of income.

1976: Going National

The competition in 1976 was so successful that we decided to go national. This was to involve a repeat of the event, but with selected schools from interstate involved as a pilot scheme for national participation in 1978.

1977: Money

The offices used to this point of time were just our own. The maths secretary Maree Beer had handled all money and she now had a tin containing $110, which we had to work out what to do with. My recollection is that cheques in 1976 had been made out to the University and we could reclaim. But it was time for us to open our own account, and also to get a Treasurer. Our colleague as mathematics lecturer Peter Brown agreed to take this on. He was treasurer for some time and one of the strongest contributors to policy over the coming years.

More

I will not continue this narrative on early aspects of the Australian Mathematics Competition here. Rather this becomes a part of my other web site here, where I continue the much larger story separately. However in the following chapter I will return here to write some of the personal experiences as Executive Director of the Australian Mathematics Trust from 1994 to 2012.