The Nordic Mathematical Contest (NMC) is a mathematics competition for secondary school students from the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. It takes place every year in March or April and serves the double purpose of being a regional secondary school level mathematics competition for the Nordic region and a step in the process of selection of the teams of the participating countries for the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the regional Baltic Way competition.
Participation
At most twenty participants from each country are appointed by the organisers of the national secondary school level mathematics competitions. They must either be eligible to the IMO or attend a secondary school. (The foreword of ref. renders the eligibility requirements unlike the past and present regulations.)
Problems
The exam consists of four problems to be answered in four hours. Only writing and drawing tools are permitted. For each problem the contestant can get from zero to seven points. The problems are of the IMO type and harder than those of the national secondary school level competitions in mathematics of the Nordic countries but not as hard as those of the IMO. They are chosen by the organising committee of the host country of the year from proposals submitted by the national organising committees.
The official web site of the NMC provides a complete collection in English with solutions of the problems from all the years. It is compiled by Matti Lehtinen. Selected versions of the problems in other Nordic languages are also available at the site
Organisation
The NMC is run in a decentralised manner involving no travel of the contestants nor any other personnel. The contestants write the exam in their own schools on the same day. Thence the papers are sent to a committee in the contestants' country who mark them preliminarily. They are then forwarded with the preliminary marking to a committee in the host country of the year, who coordinate the marking and decide the final result of each contestant. Hosting the NMC rotates among the participating countries in a fixed order. In each country, the NMC is run by the organisers of the country's secondary school level mathematics competition.
History
Start
The early history of the NMC is documented in a series of reports in the journal Normat. According to Åke Samuelsson, the NMC was founded at a meeting of the leaders of the Nordic teams at the 27th IMO in Warsaw 1986. As Denmark did not participate in the IMO before 1991, no team leader from Denmark was there. The founding countries were Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The first NMC took place on 30 March 1987 hosted by Sweden with 47 contestants from the four participating countries. It is stressed in the report that the organisation was minimal. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th NMCs took place in 1988-90 hosted by Norway, Iceland and Finland, respectively. This established the hosting order for the future.
Rumors of this new mathematics competition reached Denmark, and in 1989 a single Danish student, who was very eager to participate, was allowed to write the exam in a school in Sweden. In 1990 more Danish students participated, so Matti Lehtinen could write in his report: "For the first time the NMO may now be called a common Nordic competition since all five Nordic countries participated with at least half a dozen pupils." (Translated from Swedish; the abbreviation NMO is elucidated in the section Name below.) Denmark was invited to host the NMC in 1991, the year Denmark entered the IMO, but since the Danish organisers were inexperienced, the Swedish organisers agreed to host the NMC for a second time. Denmark would then host the NMC in 1992 and again in 1996. In the future, the hosting order would be the present one: Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark.