(From left) Silver medalists Sean Eugene Chua and Daryll Carlsten Ko, bronze medalist Deanne Gabrielle Algenio, and team leader Kerish Villegas in Greece. Handout

MANILA – Three Filipino students won medals in the 22nd Junior Balkan Mathematical Olympiad (JBMO) held from June 19 to 24 in Rhodes, Greece.

Daryll Carlsten Ko (St. Stephen’s High School) and Sean Eugene Chua (Xavier School) received silver medals, while Deanne Gabrielle Algenio (Makati Science High School) bagged a bronze medal.

They were accompanied by team leader Kerish Villegas.

“We congratulate our three contestants for winning medals in the math competition. This is another honor for our country,” Dr. Isidro Aguilar, Mathematics Trainers Guild-Philippines president, said
in a statement.

The three participants went on to recall their challenges during the competition. 

“This year’s JBMO was a mixture of handleable and challenging problems. Some of them only required a direct flow of logic, while the others needed very specific observations in order to advance in the problem,” said Ko.

“It was not easy to think of ideas that could help us make progress in solving each problem,” he added.

Chua, on the other hand, said: “Although the problems seemed straightforward, they were designed in such a way that we were challenged to really think out of the box while being pushed to the limit.”

Algenio, meanwhile, said: “Challenging, brain provoking, mind-boggling problems, but nothing we Pinoy mathletes cannot hurdle.”

Aside from the Philippines and Greece, other participants in this year’s JBMO came from Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, France, Republic of Moldova, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Turkmenistan.

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