Frequently Asked Questions About Albany Area Math Circle

(Updated September 2025)

What is Albany Area Math Circle?

Albany Area Math Circle (AAMC) is a group of high school students from all over the Capital District who meet for two hours roughly biweekly on Sunday afternoons from 4 to 6 p.m. to collaborate on exciting and challenging math problems together.  Our meeting schedule generally runs from early November through early May.

You might call it “Extreme Math.” The problems are “outside-the-box.” Students need to come with enthusiasm for working hard and cheerfully making mistakes (which are inevitable—everyone makes them, even the veterans who have been part of the circle for many years. The adults advising the group cheerfully admit that they make mistakes as well—it is part of the fun of the experience.) The key is for all members of the circle to share their half-baked approaches and ideas and discover that the whole really is more than the sum of the parts. The essence of the fun is a “Shared Aha! Experience” when several students finally crack a problem together.

Who is eligible to join AAMC?

High school students from all around the Capital District are welcome to become part of our community. There is no qualifying test for high school students. You will need to register by joining our email list before your first meeting. (See instructions below for how to do this.)

The only requirements for a high school student member are enthusiasm for working hard and cheerfully on challenging math problems, a willingness to make mistakes, to celebrate your mistakes and learn from them, to share both cool insights and half-baked solution approaches with other students.

We expect all members of AAMC to work with one another in a generous, kind, and helpful spirit. We expect all students to behave in a way that will contribute to an enthusiastic and productive learning community.

Are younger students eligible to join AAMC before ninth grade?

The problems we work on at AAMC at our regular Sunday meetings are very challenging, even for advanced high school students already taking college courses. Furthermore, our meetings are two hours long, which is a long time to work on hard math problems!

However, AAMC's high school students provide many outreach efforts for younger students who enjoy math challenges.

We encourage our high school student members to serve as assistant coaches in MATHCOUNTS programs at nearby middle schools. Over the years, AAMC members have enjoyed serving as student coaches for MATHCOUNTS programs at Acadia, Doyle, Farnsworth, Gowana, HEEG, Iroquois, Koda, and Van Antwerp Middle Schools. If your middle school would like a student coach to assist the teacher or other adult sponsor coach, AAMC would be happy to assist in recruiting one.

Some of our high school student members serve as coaches of satellite middle school math circles.

We encourage local schools to offer the AMC contests, starting with the AMC8 for students in eighth grade and below, which is offered in November. Middle school students who achieve Honor Roll scores on the AMC8 are encouraged to take the AMC10 or AMC12 contests in November. These high school contests are extremely challenging, but they can be good learning experiences for a few younger students who are ready to take the next step beyond middle school math contests. Students who score high on the AMC10 or AMC12 contests may qualify for the American Invitational Math Exam (AIME) given in March.

With the exception of our special outreach activities described above, our regular AAMC meetings are organized for high school student members. Very rarely, middle school students who have qualified for the AIME may also be invited to join our regular meetings. This is very much the exception, rather than the rule, and younger students should not be discouraged if they find the AMC preliminary exams extremely challenging. Some of our strongest high school members only qualified for AIME after several years of trying.

There are many excellent math enrichment resources available for younger students at libraries, bookstores, and on the Internet.

Do AAMC members participate in any math contests? Yes, AAMC students have joined together to form teams that have competed in a number of math contests over the past five years. AAMC teams have done very well, but you should know that participating in math contests is strictly optional for AAMC members. We realize that official competitions are not everyone's cup of tea. There is no requirement to participate in official math contests and students who just want to join in the fun of working hard on challenging problems at our meetings are very welcome! One important note: if your school has its own team for a particular competition, you should compete on your school's team for that particular contest, NOT on AAMC's team. We want to support those schools that choose to field their own teams.

How do I sign up for the AlbanyAreaMathCircle email list?

Step 1) High school students and parents should go to https://groups.google.com/g/albanyareamathcircle/ and request to join the group. If you have difficulties in signing up, please email AAMC Advisor Alexandra Schmidt at aleph@stanfordalumni.org for troubleshooting assistance. Please send a separate message originating from each email address where you would like to receive math circle emails. So, for example, if Sarah and both of her parents all want to subscribe to our email list, they should each send an email to the above address from their respective emails. The body text of your email can just briefly state your name, school, and grade (or your student's name school and grade) so we can recognize you as a math circle member or parent and approve your subscription. Once you are approved for subscription, you will automatically get information about problems to print out and bring to meetings, how to sign up for math contests with us, and many other important details! Step 2) Please use the form at this link to give us all the essential contact information for your student.

Where and when do you meet? This year, we are again meeting on Sundays afternoons from 4 to 6 p.m. in Troy. Members who join our googlegroups email list will get information about the exact location and parking/entrance directions.

Who are the AAMC advisors? The current lead advisor/head coach for Albany Area Math Circle is Ms. Alexandra Schmidt.

The founding AAMC Advisors in 2001 were Mary O'Keeffe and Mukkai Krishnamoorthy. They have served as volunteer advisors to the group since its founding in 2001, and they still help out.

Is there a cost to joining AAMC? We are an all-volunteer organization and we do all we can to keep costs minimal. We also try to keep costs down at travel contests. Entry fees are generally moderate ($10 per student is typical.) advisors coordinate information so parents can make arrangements with one another to carpool to distant contests. Some contests can be done as day trips to hold down overnight lodging costs. Other contests are held on college campuses and, with advance notice, it is sometimes possible for students to stay with college student hosts in the dorms at minimal cost. In most years, the statewide NYSML tournament arranges host families who are willing to accommodate students traveling from a distance. (Last year's lodging arrangements for NYSML were very unusual, due to the NYC location.)

Where do AAMC members live? Albany Area Math Circle brings together students from a wide variety of communities. Our membership has changed year to year. Students and alumni have hailed from all over the Capital District including the following communities: Albany Averill Park Ballston Lake Bethlehem Clifton Park Coxsackie Cropseyville Delmar Fort Edward Guilderland Latham Niskayuna Saratoga Springs Scotia-Glenville Schenectady Troy Watervliet AAMC members have come from the following schools: Albany High School, Averill Park High School, Bethlehem High School, Coxsackie High School, Guilderland High School, Niskayuna High School, Schenectady High School, Scotia-Glenville High School, Shaker High School, Shenendahoah High School, and Troy High School. We also have homeschool students and students from the Albany Academies, Doane Stuart, and Emma Willard. We are happy to build bridges of collaboration among students who might not otherwise have an opportunity to work together.

MATHCOUNTS Congratulations!

I am delighted to share the exciting news that two Albany Area Math Circle members placed among the top four individuals at last week's New York State MATHCOUNTS championship contest, earning the right to represent our state at the National MATHCOUNTS Competition in Orlando Florida in May.  David Li from Utica was the New York State champion and Rowechen Zhong from Iroquois was the fourth highest scoring individual, and his school team (pictured below) was second place in the state.

Iroquois Middle School team
Steve Schmidt (coach), Stephanie Vernooy (coach),
Harini Prabaharan, Jeffrey Huang, Christine Lee, [name redacted], Rowechen Zhong

Congratulations to the entire Iroquois Middle School's team and coaches for their outstanding second place finish at the state contest last weekend.  Veteran head coach Professor Steve Schmidt is my colleague in the economics department at Union College as well as the husband of AAMC advisor Ms. Alexandra Schmidt. Steve headed a strong coaching team that included Professor Stephanie Vernooy (from Siena College's Biology Department) and AAMC student coaches Gabriel Kammer and Ian Vernooy.  AAMC alumni Gideon Schmidt and Patrick Chi served as student coaches in prior years helping veterans on the Iroquois team build a firm foundation in their earlier years of middle school, as did prior adult coach Ambady Suresh.

Professor Schmidt will coach the New York State team at the National MATHCOUNTS Competition in May and will accompany David, Rowechen, and their two teammates to Orlando.

Congratulations again and best wishes to all!

Intriguing guest speaker: Professor Ivana Alexandrova

This spring, our math circle was fortunate to have a special treat:   Professor Ivana Alexandrova from UAlbany gave our high school students a guest presentation full of fascinating problems in trigonometry.  Professor Alexandrova grew up in Vratsa, Bulgaria, which has a rich and venerable tradition of math circles, and she herself participated in math circles as a student before coming to this country for college and graduate studies.  As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, she met another mathematician from Bulgaria, Professor Zvezdelina Stankova, who leads the Berkeley Math Circle, and she was happy to learn that math circles have started to establish themselves in this country as well.

Professor Ivana Alexandrova with math circle student leaders Gili Rusak and Phil Sun after her intriguing talk.  Gili and Phil are graduating seniors and longtime members of Albany Area Math Circle.  Like Professor Alexandrova, they have grown up as members of a math circle that helped to develop their passion for problem solving and they have been sharing their passions and talents with younger students.  Next year Gili will be studying at Stanford and Phil will be studying at MIT.

Professor Alexandrova, whose research focuses on partial differential equations and mathematical physics, chose to discuss trigonometry in her presentation, because it is a beautiful, highly useful, and often misunderstood subject which is unfortunately somewhat neglected in conventional American mathematics education.  Many college professors share her wish that their students had stronger backgrounds in trig.  Under her guidance scary looking trig problems that might initially make your eyes glaze over sparkled and came to life as she developed beautiful ways to approach them.  Her trig problems were indeed very intriguing!

You can see some of her presentation in the whiteboard shots below.  She has also created a very nice website for high school students with weekly problems designed to draw less experienced students into the world of intriguing math, with a few algebra problems mixed in among the trig problems.  You can find her problems and solutions here.   The current problem is very nice:  Solve 1 + sin x + cos x < 0.

Math Circle plans for the 2013-2014 school year: new time/day/location

Albany Area Math Circle will be starting up its 13th year!

Our high school group will start meeting soon.  We welcome new students in grades 9 to 12 to join us.  To stay informed with all the information you need about place/day/time, please sign up for our email list by sending an email to AlbanyAreaMathCircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Students in middle school (grades 8 and below), we have not forgotten about you.  Our high school students will be making plans for fun events to welcome you into our mathematical community later this year.  Your parents are also welcome to sign up for our email list (using the same address as above) so your families can stay informed about those plans.

Recommended summer reading for young students (and their parents!) aspiring to climb mathematical mountains together this summer

Does math class make your child feel like a hamster in a cage stuck in a wheel of an endlessly repetitive "spiral curriculum" with little to challenge or inspire her?   If you answered yes, then this book could provide a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Imagine if one of your daughter's classmates had an MIT professor dad who loved the fun of mathematical problem solving in his spare time.  Dream on and imagine that he volunteered to share his enthusiasm and talents as a mentor with a small group of students including your child, busting them out of the conventional curriculum hamster wheel to take them on challenging mathematical rock-climbing adventures with inspiring views of beautiful mathematical mountain vistas.

Glenn Ellison's daughters are fortunate to have just such a dad and this engaging book is the result of his very successful mathematical excursions with his daughters and their schoolmates. Some of the students with whom he has worked for a number of years have now grown into world-class problem solvers.

Written in a good-natured conversational style, Hard Math for Elementary School lays the foundation for elementary school students to develop the tools and habits of confident, capable, and curious problem solvers.   The text provides well-organized explanations and the accompanying workbook poses thoughtfully composed practice problems designed to inspire children to tackle tough problems that exceed the expectations of conventional textbooks. This book and its earlier counterpart for somewhat older students, Hard Math for Middle School, are great solutions to questions frequently posed by parents of young students looking for summer reading for their mathematically voracious students.

Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med

And springth the wude nu,

Sing cuccu!

Enjoy your summer!  Parents may find they too enjoy learning some new mathematical insights if they talk about these problems with their children.  It is great for students to discover that sometimes they can figure out answers to problems that stump grownups!  As I have discovered myself, time and time again, when working with my own children as well as other people's children in my math outreach activities, while it may be humbling for me, it is empowering and exciting for children when a flash of insight enables them to climb a mathematical mountain before I do. 

(Disclosure:  thanks to Professor Ellison for sharing a prepublication review copy of the manuscript with me.)

Doing justice to describing the work of other math circles that have inspired us

Last week, Sol Lederman interviewed Gili Rusak and myself for a podcast now featured on his blog, Wild About Math.   Thanks to Catherine Miller for typing up a transcript of that conversation, which will soon be available in a link on Sol's blogpost.  Reading that transcript of an informal live unrehearsed and unscripted conversation was certainly humbling and subsequent reflection made me realize that there are things I need to clarify.  There were so many things that I wish I had said, inspiring people who have massively contributed to our math circle I wish I had named or things I had said a bit more clearly.  In one case, what came out of my mouth (when I was talking about "ends and means") was totally the opposite of what I intended to say and changed the meaning entirely.   So I have added annotation in brackets to the transcript, and I have also provided links.

It was a fun experience talking to Sol, who is clearly a kindred spirit, an amateur math-lover like the two of us who shares our passion for promoting math communities where people enjoy celebrating mistakes and sharing Aha! experiences as they explore challenging problems together.  We touched on many subjects and definitely did not have time to do justice to all of them in an hour-long informal conversation.

I want to acknowledge here in this  blog an important distinction which we did not make in the podcast and which I have also neglected to make in the past in this blog, and which Ken Fan, the mathematician who directs Girls' Angle, and invented the treasure hunt concept, has called to our attention and asked that we clarify.  There is a good deal of difference between SUMiT, the original treasure hunt created by Girls' Angle and the small local treasure hunts in Schenectady inspired by it.  We have not described the extremely rich complexity of the far more elaborate original SUMiT event Gili attended.  Although Ken has asked that SUMiT participants not disclose the full details of that experience (in order not to spoil the story line for future participants), he would like to clarify that the original event is far more complex with several stages, and the crossword element described by Gili in the podcast was only one of those stages.  Ken has told me that thousands of hours of work have gone into creating and developing the SUMiT event.  Prizes given to all participants included stereo speakers, a backpack, a set of Zometools, a Tetraxis puzzle from KO Sticks, candy, and a copy of Maria Dzielska's book Hypatia of Alexandra.

In the podcast, we also talked about some of the other mathematical circle communities which have inspired us and which are run by full-time professional mathematicians who dedicate their lives to creating mathematics and mathematical communities, but again I feel I did not do them adequate justice in giving them the credit they deserve for the inspiration they have provided to our math circle.  I am in awe of them and have long and fervently wished that our own local community had such dedicated fulltime professional mathematicians leading a local math circle as Harold Reiter from the Charlotte Math Club, Bob and Ellen Kaplan from the Boston Math Circle, Zvezda Stankova from the Berkeley Math Circle, Tatiana Shubin from the San Jose Math Circle, Paul Zeitz and Brandy Weigers from the San Francisco Math Circle,  Joshua Zucker from the MSRI Julia Robinson Math Festivals, Amanda Serenevy from the Riverbend Community Math Center, Ken Fan from Girls' Angle, or Japheth Wood from the NYC Math Circle and Bard Math Circle.

I also wish that I had encountered such people and communities when I was a student myself.  I missed out on a lot of joy as a result when I was young.  I never dreamed that math would be fun to do as a student or that it would be fun to do with other people rather than as a solitary pursuit.  Indeed, when I was Gili's age, math was my weakest subject and I remember feeling quite lost and confused in my 10th grade geometry class (a much less advanced math class than she is taking.  Like a number of our math circle students, Gili is already taking advanced college math courses.)  It was only later when my younger brother and sister--out of desperation and having nobody else to turn to as they were entering a new high school where they did not want to be behind the other students--started asking for my help in learning mathematics that I began to get an inkling that it could actually be fun to figure out how to work together with them to try to find answers for their questions and to share my own (generally half-baked) insights.  In some sense, we are still doing that in our math circle all these years later.

I also want to make clear that--in default of such folks living in our midst--our Albany Area Math Circle activities are all led by adult and student volunteers, amateurs who do not have the mathematical sophistication of full-time professional mathematicians who have spent their lives immersed in mathematics.   While we have benefited from the countless wonderful ideas generously shared by professional mathematician math circle leaders and especially the facilitation of MSRI National Association of Math Circles in providing opportunities for them to share their ideas with us, we have no illusions that the depth of our mathematical understanding of all the nuances of the problems we investigate is anything like theirs or that we are able to describe them fully, but we do encourage others not to give up altogether if they also find themselves in a community lacking such dedicated professionals.

I encourage all our members as well as readers of this blog thinking about starting their own local math communities to go directly to the source--and also to support the math circles led by professionals  whose work you admire by considering purchasing some of the MSRI Math Circle book series, Bob and Ellen Kaplan's books, subscribing to the Girls' Angle Bulletin, participating in a future SUMiT, and/or just making a donation directly to any of these circles that has provided ideas you have especially enjoyed.   These worthy organizations typically operate on very fragile financing and deserve your support.  The end of the school year will soon be upon us, and I know that many math teachers would be delighted to receive such a book, a subscription, and/or a thoughtful donation made in their honor rather than the usual end-of-year thank you teacher gifts like candy or toiletries.   It's a gift that will keep on giving for many years to come as your teachers' future students will benefit in many ways. You can also help support these generous professional math circle leaders by suggesting to your friendly local librarian that the library consider purchasing or subscribing to their publications.

Math Circle student research honors

Math Circle students Gili Rusak, Matthew Babbitt, and Zubin Mukerjee have won honors this year for their original math research projects.   They will be presenting their research in separate sessions at the 20th annual Hudson Undergraduate Math Research Conference, which will be held at Williams College on Saturday April 6.

Gili's applied mathematics project, An Analysis of Teenage Twitter Communities, which draws on graph theory, probability, and sociology, won top honors at  Capital Regional Science and Engineering Fair at RPI  last week.  This means that Gili will represent our region at the Intel  International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) to be held in Phoenix, Arizona.  This is the world's largest international science fair, where over 1,500 students from over 70 countries around the world gather to present their work.  Over $3 million in prizes will be awarded.  Gili is a sophomore at Shaker High School who has been taking advanced college classes at Siena College.  You can read more about Gili's awesome work as a mathematical community builder here.

Matt Babbitt's graph theory research project, Counting number of edges, thickness, and chromatic number of k-visibility graphs, won semifinalist honors in this year's Intel Science Talent Search.  Matt's research benefits from advice from his MIT Research Science Institute mentor, Jesse Geneson, and Dr. Tanya Khovanova, the head mathematics mentor at RSI.  Matt, a homeschooled senior from Fort Edward  who has taken advanced math classes at Union College, has been named a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar and plans to attend MIT next year.

Zubin Mukerjee's number theory research project, Random Involutions and the Number of Prime Factors, is based on his joint work with a fellow student, Uthsav Chitra, at PROMYS last summer.  Their research mentor was Dr. Kristen Wickelgren, a research fellow at Harvard.   The project won semifinalist honors in the Siemens Competition in Math Science and Technology.  Zubin, a senior at Guilderland High School, who has been taking advanced math classes at SUNY Albany, has also won a number of honors in history and music.  You can read more about Zubin here.