The judges of the 15th Colorado Mathematical Olympiad. From the left: Soifer, Matthew Kahle, Dr. Ming Song, Bob Ewell, Shane Holloway, two physics students, and Jerry Klemm. May 1, 1998 
Russell Shaffer, Colorado Springs, receiving Gold Medal at the 1st Colorado Math Olympiad, April 1984. He went on to MIT, then to Princeton (Theoretical Computer Science Ph.D.) 
Soifer answering the questions of John Crocket, a Gold winner 
Soifer's lecture at the Award Presentation for the winners of the Olympiad. Every year, Awards begin with a lecture showing all problems and solutions, followed by a lecture on deep but entertaining mathematics. This one was about mathematical coloring problems. 
2021 Gold Medal (First Prize) winner Shruti Arun, 8th grader, and Alexander Soifer
This year, the Soifer Mathematical Olympiad is celebrating its 40th anniversary as one of the most esteemed math competitions in the world. This Olympiad was primarily responsible for Alexander Soifer’s election as President of the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions, 2012–2018.
Since its inception in 1984, the Olympiad has inspired generations of students to engage with mathematics in creative, challenging and deeply rewarding ways, and many champions have gone on to impressive professional careers in mathematics.
At the heart of this event is Alexander Soifer, the founder and driving force behind the Olympiad at UCCS. His passion for mathematics began at a young age, as a student in Moscow.
Soifer’s first introduction to the Math Olympiad was in middle school. His teacher took him across Moscow four consecutive Sundays to compete in the Moscow University Mathematical Olympiad, and it paid off – Soifer won awards in both sixth and seventh grades. His parents, an artist and an actress, were not initially supportive of Soifer’s choice of math over music.
“Classical music was beautiful but required hours of practice every day, voluntary slave labor, while Olympiad-type math was fun, like recreation,” Soifer said.
In ninth grade, Soifer and his parents reached a compromise – he could go to magnet math school, but had to keep practicing piano with his music teacher. Soifer won more awards that year and began to understand that math was “not necessarily leisure and entertainment.”
Math Olympiad was what convinced Soifer that there could be more to math than school math.
“At school, there was no place to think, they would tell you what to use and you just compute,” he explained, “but Math Olympiad problems were deep, and creative, and sometimes surprising – a completely different world that attracted me.”
After he graduated high school, Soifer could no longer compete in Math Olympiads, but he taught a class for gifted children in a magnet mathematics school one day a week. He ran the Math Olympiad for his class of 25 children and ended up sending two of his students to compete for Moscow’s Math Olympiad team in the Soviet Union Math Olympiad – an incredible accomplishment, for Moscow team consisted of only six students.
Soifer then was invited to join the Jury of the Soviet Union National Math Olympiad, and served for three years, creating math problems for participants and grading their papers. One of his problems was deemed by the great A.N. Kolmogorov too difficult to use in the National competition and ended up forming the basis of Soifer’s second book twenty years later.
Soifer went on to begin his PhD, staying out of local politics until one summer, when he was just 19, he learned that Russian tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia. Soifer then realized a simple truth – to be a citizen means to assume your share of responsibility for what your country does, because it does it on your behalf.
And so, while he wrote his PhD dissertation at 23 and became a senior researcher, he also began to look for a way out, eventually leaving Russia in 1978, terminating his citizenship so as not to feel responsible for what the country was doing.
He took a temporary role as a university lecturer in Boston, sending out hundreds of job applications and receiving offers from UMass Boston, UCLA, and UCCS.
“I didn’t even want to come to Colorado Springs for an interview when invited,” he said, “but they said they would show me mountains, and I had never seen mountains in my life.”
The interviewers took Soifer to Divide for lunch and drove him down Gold Camp Road.
“The air was so clean and scenery so spectacular that I told them I would take it, and so I ended up here,” he said. “And I immediately suggested Math Olympiad, but the chair said ‘yes, one day.’”
Undeterred, Soifer asked his junior math students if they wanted to join him in creating a Colorado Math Olympiad, and 15 out of his 20 students were on board.
“And so, it started,” he said.
Once the Olympiad was established at UCCS, Soifer also served for nine years on the six-member USA national Math Olympiad committee, from 1996-2005 (the board extended the traditional 6-year term limitation to keep him on).
Soifer, who has written three books about his Math Olympiad, continued to write questions for the event, offering the same questions to every student who came, regardless of age, meaning that middle school students and high school seniors were getting the same questions.
“My problems have to be based on creativity, on talent, rather than on knowledge,” he explained, “to keep the competition fair. It’s hard, but it’s exciting.”
In his books, Soifer shows how solutions of harder Olympiad problems inspire trains of thought that lead the reader to the forefront of mathematics, to unsolved problems, and lead the kids in Math Olympiad to careers in research.
In the past forty years, “the Olympiad problems have become deeper, richer, but also harder,” Soifer explained.
But Colorado students are rising to the occasion. Over the past four decades, the Olympiad has become more than just a competition; it has been a launching pad for countless students, many of whom have gone on to achieve remarkable success in their academic and professional careers. Dr. Soifer proudly recounted the story of Aaron Parsons, a student from the small rural town of Rangely, Colorado, who won first prize at the Olympiad and eventually earned a PhD in astronomy from UC Berkeley and is presently professor there. Other winners have gone on to MIT, Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, and more.
The Olympiad has benefited more than just Colorado students. Participants have come from New York, Wyoming, Alabama and Nebraska to compete. Once the Olympiad hosted the whole National Math Team of the Philippines.
“One thing we should never do is say no to kids who want to compete,” Soifer explained. “At the Olympiad, not only will they learn mathematics, but they will also meet with each other, because many of them are considered ‘nerds’ in their own schools, and so it’s important for them to meet other ‘nerds’ to see that they are really not nerds at all.”
Sadly, this year’s event will likely be the last.
“It’s time to close the shop,” Soifer said. “But the 40th Soifer Math Olympiad will be great. The last problem of the last Olympiad is fabulous, proving certain maps can be colored in six colors. It’s beautiful, it’s so different from all the Olympiads around the world.”
"It’s a huge part of my life, this Olympiad,” he concluded. And while the event may not continue, Soifer’s devotion to nurturing mathematical talent will continue to positively impact each Olympian who has participated over the past forty years.