Welcome to all participants of the EGMO 2020! Today, at 14:00 UTC, the EGMO 2020 has officially started with the opening ceremony. During this ceremony, the organising committee gave some welcome speeches. After this, all teams were introduced. A lot of teams sent beautiful pictures of their countries and their team!
During this introduction of the teams, the symbols 2 0 2 0 and the egmo logo were permuted, one permutation per team. This way, we encountered all possible permutations of those symbols, by only interchanging two neighbours at a time. This is based on a visualisation of Lehmer’s conjecture by Tom Verhoeff. Lehmer’s conjecture states that you can obtain all permutations of some symbols by interchanging at most two neighbours at a time, with the following extra restriction: you are only allowed to visit a permutation twice, if there is only one other permutation in between.
Last, but not least, the EGMO was officially opened by Viviane Kehl, chair of the EGMO Advisory Board. She has been present at all EGMOs: she started in 2012 and 2013 as participant, and fulfilled several roles since then, including organising the EGMO in 2017 in Switserland. She wished all participants good luck and fun!
Did you miss the opening ceremony? No worries, you can still find it here: part 1 and part 2.