Camp in Seville, Spain

Two weeks in the V Sum­mer School of Math­em­at­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Sevilla, Spain fin­ished too soon.

It’s hard to say what was more inter­est­ing — morn­ing classes or even­ing enter­tain­ment. A typ­ic­al day usu­ally began with a math­em­at­ic­al warm-up, prac­tic­al exer­cises and lec­tures at the Fac­ulty of Mathematics.

The par­ti­cipants were divided into three groups. For example, the first class was about the the­ory of chaos (unpre­dict­able pre­dic­tions, crowd beha­vi­or), the oth­er group had a maths battle, and the third one cal­cu­lated algorithms. The chil­dren made robots move dur­ing a mas­ter class on robot­ics. The robot Alfie caused a lot of emo­tions. Pro­fess­or Ramon Piedra showed math­em­at­ic­al tricks at the lec­ture «Magic and Math­em­at­ics», where between some tricks we learned what a golden sec­tion, Fibon­acci sequence, pal­in­drome and much more inter­est­ing things were.

In addi­tion to the math­em­at­ic­al battles which had already become tra­di­tion­al in Spain (although the idea belongs to Rus­si­an math­em­aticians! ;-)), in the morn­ing we had a les­son on the pro­duc­tion of ordin­ary and para­bol­ic hyper­bol­oids. The guys even man­aged to come up with the camp logo with the GeoGebra!

Due to the cli­mat­ic con­di­tions of the city (the heat was up to 40 degrees Celsi­us), there was free time after lunch, when we could play board games, swim or sleep. It should be noted that the Rus­si­an guys were not hid­ing in the air-con­di­tioned rooms, but bravely met their Span­ish friends on the foot­ball field and in the pool!

And then the most inter­est­ing things began, we had math­em­at­ic­al quests in the Cent­ral Park of the city or at the uni­ver­sity, pair games, gift exchange, an excur­sion to the main cathed­ral of Seville.

I would like to say a few words about the lat­ter, because this is the third largest Goth­ic cathed­ral in the world! It con­tains sym­bol­ic keys from the city, exhib­its numer­ous reli­gious attrib­utes of the 13–18 cen­tur­ies, and Chris­toph­er Colum­bus is bur­ied there. We climbed 34 floors to the top of the cathed­ral bell tower, where we could see a spec­tac­u­lar view of the city.

It’s hard to stop speak­ing about this trip: an excur­sion to Cor­doba, a hike to the «Chris­topher­’s Egg» (the monu­ment is a gift from the Rus­si­an Fed­er­a­tion), and so on; we can describe the com­fort­able liv­ing con­di­tions of the uni­ver­sity cam­pus in cool rooms for 1 or 2 people :)

Unfor­tu­nately, the time in the camp was over. The last day star­ted as usu­al: prob­lem solv­ing, classes in groups (study of Max­im­a’s pro­gram, mod­el­ing in 3D and so on), a lec­ture on uni­ver­sal con­stants. But in the even­ing after the mas­ter class on a hex­oflexo cre­ation, a farewell party took place, where the Span­ish and Rus­si­an chil­dren, with tears in their eyes, wrote won­der­ful wishes to each other.