Wow, no ones bragged in a while here. Time to revive this thread!

DS10, as part of a team of four, took part in the fifth grade section of an international math competition. The website just shows they have done well enough to win a prize, but their teacher told them that they placed first in our tri state region (apparently the nation has been split up in five regions) and ahead of at least another two state region. So, probably fourth in the nation. Sadly, only the very first team in the nation gets to go to Budapest for the finals.

(Unfair, she rails in secret, considering we live in Europe's second most populous country and our tri state region alone is actually more populous than 35 existing European countries. I could wish for the schools of the teams that are ahead to be hit by funding crises and his team being invited at the last minute, but I happen to know the community the public school of which is fielding the finalist team, and even if the school couldn't afford the airfare, one of the parents could probably donate it from petty cash.)

I did ask DS who he thought was the best mathematician of the team (yes, these days, after having been told all my life I am not that smart, and several times in DS's life that he as not that smart, I am that petty. I own it). DS said he couldn't say, since they had split up into pairs and worked on one half of the problems each. However, he then recalled that when they swapped problems to go over the other pair's solutions, the other pair hadn't been able to solve three out of seven, which he had to solve for them.

I left him to his deductions.