Luis Caceres, Puerto Rico

Luis Caceres receives his Award at Hamburg on 30 July 2016 from Prof. Dr. Gabriele Kaiser, ICME-13 Convenor. WFNMC President Prof. Alexander Soifer is second from left and Chair of Awards Committee Prof. Maria Falk de Losada is at right.

Citation

Prof. Cáceres is very well known in the field of the mathematical competitions, not only at the IMO but also in the Iberoamerican Mathematical Olympiad and others, like the Mathematical Kangaroo and the Centroamerican and Caribbean Mathematical Olympiad, OMCC by its name in Spanish.

He established the Kangaroo Mathematical Contest in Puerto Rico, and he is helping other countries of the Caribbean area to develop their mathematical competitions, with a tremendous success in Jamaica. As a result of that Jamaica is adhering to the KSF community and it also will host the OMCC in 2016. It is important to mention that Jamaica will have the IMU support to organize the OMCC thanks to Dr. Cáceres, who presented to the IMU consideration for a project to get funds to help to organize the OMCC during the next years.

Besides Dr. Cáceres having organized with great success the KSF meeting in 2014, the OMCC in 2010, and this year, he is leading the organization of the 30th Iberoamerican Mathematical Olympiad in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.

There is a big different in Mathematical Olympiads in Puerto Rico, before Dr Cáceres, and after the year 2001, when he began to work with the mathematical contest there.

As the President of the Kangourou Sans Frontieres Association (KSFA) which organizes the competition Mathematical Kangaroo I would like to emphasize the importance of Prof. Cáceres’ contribution to the global success of this competition. The competition Mathematical Kangaroo started in Europe in 1990’s with 10 countries taking part, but quickly spread to other parts of the world which is also due to the work of Prof. Cáceres. So it is not a surprise that after 21 annual meetings organized in Europe, Puerto Rico was the first country out of Europe entrusted to organize the annual meeting of the KSFA in 2014. The meeting was a great success due to excellent work done by Prof. Cáceres and his team. The work of Prof. Cáceres is well recognized by the members of the KSFA and as a result Prof. Cáceres was elected to the Board of KSFA, in addition, the general assembly appointed him in 2014 to the position of the Secretary of the KSFA.

The results of the Puerto Rico IMO team with Prof. Cáceres being the leader of the team most of time in the last decade have been most admirable. In particular a gold medal at the IMO 2010 is an excellent result taking into account the population of the country.

All the mentioned results at the international level are the natural consequence of the successful and fruitful work done at the national level by Mathematics Olympiad in Puerto Rico with Prof. Cáceres as its president.