Australian Mathematics Competition
Australian Mathematics Competition 2026
The first cohort of students sat the Australian Mathematics Competition in 1978. Once known as the Westpac Mathematics Competition, the AMC has remained Australia’s premier mathematics problem-solving competition for almost 50 years.
The Junior Division is aimed at Years 7 & 8 Students. Years 9 & 10 students submit answers to the Intermediate Paper, and VCE students attempt the Senior Competition. In previous iterations of this enrichment activity, students gained negative points for mistakes made and it was therefore possible to achieve a negative score. Thankfully, today’s competition is more encouraging, with between 3 and 10 points available for each question, depending upon the difficulty.
One of the intermediate questions caused a fair bit of discussion amongst our Year 10 representatives. To paraphrase: if eight lots of the three-digit number ABC is equal to the three-digit number FUN, what is the value of n? Pause, have a go, and I’ll give you the answer at the end.
In 2026, St Aloysius proudly had 189 students registered to complete this year’s set of questions. We had students competing from across Years 7 to 12 students. Awards range from Participation Certificates all the way to Prize Winners. Students who achieve a Distinction are placed in the top 20% of students in their year group, and High Distinction winners are in the top 3%. We look forward to seeing how our students have fared in this prestigious competition.
Now, back to the question. Let me start you off. Aim to make the question small, and not big. We know that FUN must be less than 1000. So, 1000 divided by 8 is equal to 125. That means that ABC must be a three-digit number less than 125, leaving not too many numbers to test out. Furthermore, the digits in ABC and FUN must all be different to each other, which helps you to rule out many of the numbers between 100 and 124 (the ones with a repeated digit): 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124. Multiply the remaining numbers by 8 to see which answers will give distinct sets of three-digit numbers. You’ll find that n must be 2, 4, or 6.
We feel very proud of all of our students who met the enrichment challenge and competed in this competition. We look forward to receiving their results in the coming weeks and months.
Kelly Gallivan
Mathematics Learning Leader