In the South Tower of the Técnico – Alameda campus, several students are waiting to be called into the room where they will take a test. This scene is common at Instituto Superior Técnico, but this time it’s not for a regular curricular unit – the first edition of the Integration Bee at Técnico is about to begin. This mathematical competition, focused on solving integrals, follows a format created in 1981 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Organised by the Mathematics Students’ Organisation at Técnico (NMath), the event took place on May 31.
The written test took place in the morning and challenged participants to solve either ten or 20 integrals – depending on whether they were competing individually or in pairs – all within a 20-minute time limit. ‘It’s very little time to solve so many integrals’, confesses Diogo Esteves with a smile. While sitting on one of the benches in the corridor and waiting to see the test sheet, the Master’s student in Engineering Physics shares that he and his competition partner, Afonso Santos, signed up for the challenge simply ‘for the thrill’. After all, solving integrals ‘is like a puzzle’.
Laura Muliar echoes the enthusiasm of her fellow participants. She is also competing in a pair, but this is her first year at Técnico. The undergraduate student in Computer Science and Engineering already has experience in similar competitions; she even wears a t-shirt representing the International Maths Olympiad, held in Hungary in 2023, in which she participated. Before heading into the room, she admits to having “a bit of an adrenaline rush” about the upcoming “20-minute sprint.”
A few hours later, the test took place in the Physics and Mathematics Building, but this time on the board in front of an audience. Here, the top positions in the rankings were contested, with the test judge announcing each result after solving each problem (followed by enthusiastic applause whenever a competitor answered correctly). The room was filled with spectators who challenged themselves to solve the problems at their own pace.
Victory would come more than an hour later for Rafael Hipólito (followed by André Crispim and Francisco Cunha in second place and with Jing Xu rounding out the podium). Still a bit breathless from nerves, the student from the Faculty of Sciences confessed that he ‘didn’t expect to win at all’, describing the experience as ‘a spectacular feeling’. ‘I think what happened here was mostly luck, because any of us could have won – I saw some colleagues using solving techniques that really surprised me,’ he praised. As for the prize money, he will have to honour an agreement he made with friends who also participated in the competition – if one of them won, that person would treat the others to dinner.
