Baltic Way Mathematical Contests

The Baltic Way team competition is held on the shore of the Baltic Sea every autumn since 1990. The name of the competition comes from the mass demonstration for the freedom of the Baltic States organised on August 23, 1989, when people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood hand in hand along the road from Tallinn to Vilnius.

The rules of the competition are simple: each country sends a team of 5 high school students, who are expected to solve 20 problems within 4.5 hours. During this time, the team members can and must communicate — otherwise they would not be able to solve such a quantity of problems. Hence, Baltic Way is not only about mathematical knowledge, but also about cooperational skills.

For the first two years, only teams from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania took part in the event, but later all the other countries surrounding the Baltic Sea (and also Iceland) joined in. Thus, the contest is now normally held among 11 teams: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany (represented mainly by Rostock and Hamburg), Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia (represented by St. Petersburg) and Sweden. Sometimes organisers also invite a guest team to take part in the contest. In 2001, there was a guest team from Israel, in 2004 and 2014, from Belarus, in 2005, from Belgium, in 2011, from South Africa, in 2015, from the Netherlands, and in 2021, from Ireland.