Registration
Online entries will open on the 12th of July. Students can register online by clicking on this link. The closing date for online registration is the 8th August 2025. University coordinators will be informed of these registrations by the 12h, and further registrations can be done with the coordinators themselves until the 16th August. Where a coordinator is not available, the students of that particular university will be allowed to write at a neighbouring university where possible.
Universities that would like to participate are requested to contact Herman Bosman (South African Mathematics Foundation, [email protected]).
Eligibility
The competition is open to all undergraduate students, i.e., students enrolled at a university without having already received a degree, who have not been studying for more than four years.
Honours students are also welcome, but there will be a separate ranking for them. High school students can be allowed in exceptional cases as well.
Syllabus
There is no fixed universal syllabus for tertiary competitions, hence there is also no strict syllabus for the SATMO.
Generally, we aim for ingenuity rather than subject knowledge. We do not want to unnecessarily disadvantage first-year students, and it is also hard to find an intersection among all universities in the country that goes beyond basic calculus and linear algebra. Hence differential and integral calculus and some linear algebra (matrices, systems of linear equations) can be part of the questions, but not much more advanced mathematics. Elementary questions involving, e.g., abstract algebra, combinatorics, graph theory or even topology are possible, provided that no extensive theoretical knowledge (that would go beyond first year mathematics) is necessary. Otherwise, problems will only use elementary (high school level) mathematics.
