The first of these contests was held in 1894 by the Mathematical and Physical Society (of Hungary) in honor of its founder and president, the distinguished physicist Baron Loránd Eötvös, who became minister of education that year. To commemorate the event, the contests are given every fall and are open to high school graduates of that year. The contestants work in classrooms under supervision; the Society selects the two best papers, and the awards—a first and second Eötvös Prize—are given to the winners by the president himself at the next session of the Society.

The present volume, appearing on the tenth anniversary of Eötvös' death, contains the contests held to date. While it utilizes the winners' work, the solutions are in general not those found by the students….

The names of the winners are listed; their papers appeared in full in Matematikai és Fizikai Lapok, the Journal of the Society; here, however, the solutions were changed to suit the didactic aim of the book.

Some of my notes give definitions and proofs of theorems used in the solutions. Others serve to point out the connection between problems and famous results in literature. In some instances I was able to give a glimpse of the essence of an entire subject matter; in others the mere statement of a general theorem had to suffice….

There are few prerequisites. A person who has learned to solve quadratic equations and knows plane geometry can solve many of the problems. If he also knows trigonometry, he can solve most of them.