Sharygin Geometrical Olympiad 2026: Cheenta's Kolkata Center Hosts the Final Round

Cheenta recently hosted the final round of the Sharygin Geometrical Olympiad 2026 at its Kolkata center, spread across two days — 31st July and 1st August, from 12 PM to 4 PM each day. Students sat across the table from a panel of jurors and defended their geometric proofs the old-fashioned way: pen, paper, and conversation.

A Little About I.F. Sharygin and the Olympiad's History

The olympiad is named after Igor Fedorovich Sharygin (1937–2004), a Soviet and Russian mathematician best known for his lifelong devotion to elementary geometry. Sharygin wrote extensively for school-level students, and his books — including Problems in Geometry: Plane Geometry and Problems in Geometry: Solid Geometry — shaped how generations of young mathematicians in Russia (and later, well beyond it) learned to think about triangles, circles, and the quiet logic that connects them.

After his passing in 2004, several Russian mathematical and scientific organizations came together to launch an annual olympiad in his memory, starting in 2005. What began as a tribute has since grown into one of the most respected geometry-specific competitions in the world, run under the aegis of the Moscow Center for Continuous Mathematical Education, drawing correspondence-round entries from students across dozens of countries every year.

Details of the Competition

The Sharygin Geometrical Olympiad runs in two rounds:

• Correspondence round — a qualifying round solved and submitted in writing, open to high-school students of the four senior-most grades (grades 8–11 in the Russian system, with equivalent grades used for international participants).
• Final round — the round Cheenta's Kolkata center hosted this year, held as an oral examination. Participants don't submit a polished written paper. Instead, they work out their solutions on drafts and figures, and then walk a jury through the proof out loud, defending their reasoning in real time.

The scoring is refreshingly binary — a problem is marked either 1 (solved) or 0 (unsolved) — and each student gets up to three attempts to present a solution to a given problem before it's closed out. This oral format makes the final round quite different from most olympiads students are used to: it rewards not just finding the right idea, but being able to explain and defend it clearly under a jury's questioning.

The Jury

Presenting a geometry proof orally means facing genuine back-and-forth questioning, and Cheenta was fortunate to have an experienced panel of jurors (both at the center and online) across both days.

• Dr. Sankhadip Chakraborty (INMO awardee, PhD in Mathematics)
• Raghunath J V (B.Tech and M.Tech from IIT Chennai, Math Olympiad Coach at Cheenta, INMO and IMO Trainer)
• Deepan Dutta (Bachelor of Science from the University of Calcutta)
• Deepam Saha (BStat and MStat from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata)
• Shayeef Murshid (B.Math and M.Math from ISI, INMO Merit List, Doctoral Scholar at Indian Statistical Institute)
• Rishav Dutta (attended INMO camp)
• Reyanksh Deb (attended INMO camp)

Broad Curriculum of the Contest

True to Sharygin's own body of work, the olympiad stays almost entirely within classical synthetic geometry rather than leaning on heavy algebraic or trigonometric machinery. Depending on grade level, problems typically draw from areas such as:

• Triangle geometry — incenters, circumcenters, orthocenters, and the many special points and lines associated with a triangle
• Circles — tangency, power of a point, radical axes, and cyclic quadrilaterals
• Collinearity and concurrency problems, often solved through clever auxiliary constructions
• Geometric transformations — reflections, rotations, spiral similarity, and inversion (more prominent in problems for senior grades)
• Loci and constructions
• Solid geometry, occasionally, for the more advanced problem sets

The problems are graded by difficulty and intended school grade, and students are free to attempt problems set for older grades — though solutions to problems meant for younger grades aren't considered for scoring if solved by senior students. The emphasis throughout is on elegant, insight-driven proof rather than computation.

How Cheenta Helps Students

Cheenta has hosted the Indian final round of the Sharygin Geometrical Olympiad at its Kolkata center for several years now, in coordination with the organizing committee, giving Indian students a genuine international competition experience without needing to travel abroad.

Beyond simply providing the venue, Cheenta's role is to prepare students for exactly the kind of thinking this olympiad demands. Because the final round is an oral defense rather than a written submission, Cheenta's olympiad training emphasizes not just solving problems but articulating and defending a proof clearly — a skill many students never get to practice until they're standing in front of a jury for real. Cheenta's broader olympiad programs (spanning RMO, INMO, IOQM, AMC, and other national and international contests) run problem-solving sessions through the week, and its geometry-focused resources and past-paper archives give students a way to build the specific pattern-recognition and synthetic-proof instincts that Sharygin-style problems reward.

For a student, the two-day final round is more than a test — it's a chance to sit with a real jury, defend an idea under scrutiny, and experience mathematics the way it was originally meant to be shared: out loud, in conversation, and with the person you're trying to convince sitting right across the table.