Ep 403: Norm Do, Gavin Griffith (March 14, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Richard talks with Norm a little about how Norm helps train students for the mathematical olympiads.  As Norm says, it basically involves feeding them maths problems and letting them go at it.  I'll note from personal experience that there is a lot more done in the way of teaching and discussion about the problems, but fundamentally that is the approach: Get students working on challenging problems, see what they make of them, and then suggest ways in which they might find more helpful approaches to them.

Tonight's challenger is Gavin Griffith, a primary school teacher.  Seven years ago Gavin "stumbled upon" a sports camp in America, and since then has spent pretty much every American summer there (from about May through to September), dealing with around 260 kids playing a variety of sports.  As Richard points out, this means that Gavin more-or-less gets a perpetual summer, or at the very least avoids winter.  The camp involves a lot of team sports; Gavin says that he isn't that good at the sports but makes sure that they play safely and have a good time.


Norm gets an early lead due to a longer word and an error from Gavin in the numbers.  Gavin misses a couple of chances to create longer words by prefixing in the next two letters rounds, thereby giving up seven points instead of gaining them.  Norm makes a mistake in the second numbers round to give some of the large lead back, but manages to ride his remaining eleven point lead into the conundrum for safety.  Once again Norm solves it, a bit short of halfway, to end up winning 61 to 40.

I had a very disappointing night tonight.  Two words turned out to be invalid (I didn't get any longest word within time) and I was uncomfortably far away on one numbers round.  It was a night for seeing better answers within five seconds of time running out, which is always a bit frustrating.  I was actually behind going into the conundrum, but honestly fortunate to still have a chance by that point since it needed Norm's error to bring me back into contention.  I solved the conundrum quickly to escape with a very lucky win, perhaps making up for some poor luck in the game.