MATHCOUNTS Chapter Congratulations!

Today's MATHCOUNTS Capital District Chapter, one of the two largest and most competitive chapters in the state, brought together 150 students from 22 school teams around the Capital District.

The top 20 individual students were all mentored and/or coached by high school students from Albany Area Math Circle!

The top-ranking eight teams at chapter also had Albany Area Math Circle affiliated coaches.

Team rankings are as follows:



#1 Van Antwerp
(student coached by AAMC senior veteran Dave Bieber)




#2 Iroquois
(student coached by AAMC senior veteran Anagha Tolpadi and AAMC freshman Elizabeth Parizh; math circle parent Anil Tolpadi also coached; most of the Iroquois students are also members of the AAMC middle school math circle)



#3 Acadia
(student coached by AAMC junior Felix Sun and senior Eric Wang--all four members of their scoring team are also members of AAMC's middle school math circle)




#4 Farnsworth
(all four students on the scoring team plus the high scoring alternate are members of the Albany Area Math Circle middle school math circles mentored by Zubin Mukerjee and Noah Rubin.)




#5 heeg
(student coached by AAMC freshman Matthew Babbitt and math circle advisor Bill Babbitt)



#6 Shaker Junior High
(AAMC freshman Greg Hickey has assisted with coaching, and team high scorer Gili Rusak is a member of our middle school math circle.)



#7 Hebrew Academy of the Capital District
(coached by AAMC teacher volunteer Alexandra Schmidt)



#8 Koda Middle School
(student coached by AAMC vets Felix Sun and Eric Wang.)


The top 20 individuals on the written competition were:



#1 Aniket Tolpadi from Iroquois
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#2 Troy Wang from Acadia
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#3 Cecilia Holodak from Van Antwerp
(member of Albany Area Math Circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#4 David Luo from Acadia
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#5 Matt Gu from Farnsworth
(member of AAMC middle school math circle)

#6 Jerry Qu from Acadia
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#7 Jien Ogawa from Home Educators Enrichment Group (heeg)
(member of AAMC middle school math circles and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#8 Alexander Wei from Van Antwerp
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#9 Philip Sun from Acadia
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#10 Gili Rusak from Shaker
(member of AAMC middle school math circles and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#11 Bill Dong from Farnsworth
(member of AAMC middle school math circle)

#12 Isaac Smith from Home Educators Enrichment Group (heeg)
(member of AAMC middle school math circle in Niskayuna and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#13 Luxi Peng from Farnsworth
(member of AAMC middle school math circle)

#14 Isaac Malsky from Farnsworth
(member of AAMC middle school math circle)

#15 Shreya Arora from Iroquois
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#16 Suman Padhi from Iroquois
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#17 Martin Shreiner from Van Antwerp
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#18 Rajesh Bollapragada from Van Antwerp
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#19 Vineet Velangandula from Iroquois
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)

#20 Samir Menon from Iroquois
(member of AAMC middle school math circle and also on an AAMC student-coached team)



Cecilia Holodak won the countdown against awesome final round competition from last year's countdown winner Aniket Tolpadi!

Congratulations to all the student coaches and mathletes who participated and best of luck to the three teams advancing to state: Van Antwerp, Iroquois, and Acadia, as well as to Matt Gu and Jien Ogawa, who will advance to state as individuals.

Congratulations and major shout-outs as well as to Andrew Ardito, Zubin Mukerjee, and Noah Rubin, who have done awesome work as middle school math circle leaders, as well as to all the students who have helped out at our middle school math circles, including Matthew Babbitt, Preston Law, Felix Sun, Anagha Tolpadi, Schuyler and Wyatt Smith.

Thanks also--as always--to Sal Ervolinda, Vrinda Rajiv, and all the terrific volunteers from the Capital Distict Chapter of the NY Society of Professional Engineers and GE Global Research, who made this terrific event possible!

I have talked to other coaches from chapters all over the country and I do not know of another chapter that provides as spectacular an experience as our chapter: our chapter contest is held in a spectacular and awe-inspiring corporate research lab that traces its roots to Edison and Charles Steinmetz, can claim two Nobel prize winning work and thousands of patents for inventions that have improved our lives.

Please update our new master database

The image shown above was created in http://www.wordle.net based on the students whose parents had updated their records in our new 2010 master database as of noon today.

Students not on that list should ask their parents visit this link to update our records as soon as possible. If you are student-coaching middle school students who are not on the list, please contact their parents to have them update our records as well.

Thanks!
Mary O'Keeffe
Albany Area Math Circle advisor

NYSML Fall Congratulations!

Albany Area Math Circle won the New York State division of the competition and its three full-strength 8 person teams were the highest ranked in that division. All six of our teams performed impressively, especially given that three of them were lacking at least one student short of the full 8, which meant that some of the relays required ESP!

We can now collapse the wave function and report that we had two perfect scorers, Andrew Ardito and Matthew Babbitt, from the heeg team.

What is especially promising for the future of Albany Area Math Circle is that all six of our teams included many younger students, including a number of middle schoolers! Kudos to all our high school vets who have been mentoring and encouraging them! Thanks again to all the volunteer proctors and scorers who made NYSML Fall possible.

More recreational math reading suggestions

Georgia Tech Computer Science Prof. Dick Lipton has a blog which our more advanced math circle students may enjoy: Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP.

AAMC Advisor Prof. Krishnamoorthy recommends the blog and, in particular, this post discussing some of Prof. Lipton's favorite books.

Prof. Moorthy is currently reading and enjoying one of the books on Prof. Lipton's list, The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers by Ben Yandell.

I (Mary) especially liked Prof. Lipton's description of the book:

This is a book on the famous list of 23 problems of David Hilbert. What I like so much about this book is the history behind the solutions to the problems. In some cases Hilbert problems were “solved” for decades, yet eventually it was discovered that the solutions were wrong or had gaps. Part of my “hidden” agenda is to remind us all that even the immortals make mistakes, have proofs with gaps, and are human.

I heartily endorse and agree with Prof. Lipton's hidden agenda!

excellent new issue of Girls Angle bulletin

The bulletin is put together by the Girls Angle program in Cambridge, MA, where the mentors include Harvard and MIT students and faculty working with girls in grades 5 through 11. The bulletin is chock full of delights for the younger members of Albany Area Math Circle, for our older students looking for ideas to mentor them, and for all those who are young at heart mathematically, no matter what their gender.

Check their latest issue out here!

Harvard freshman Amy Tai has written a beautiful and very engaging exposition of the properties of the medians of a triangle, which begins on page 2.

Hah! I can see some eyelids drooping already.

The medians of a triangle....how exciting a topic could that be? Like watching paint dry, some of you are probably thinking to yourselves.

Too many American high school students think of geometry as a dull subject to be gulped down like cod-liver oil before moving on to more advanced topics. Amy's article makes the topic come alive as she invites the reader into the exploration along with her.

Amy's article is a superb model for younger students who really want to develop their geometric intuition AND learn how to write crystal-clear mathematical expository prose. Her illustrations make a potentially dull topic spring to life in a memorable way.

Our Albany Area Math Circle high school students who are mentoring younger students can gain some very valuable insights and ideas from reading Amy's article and related pieces in the bulletin.

The Girls' Angle bulletin also contains more articles that generalize on the idea of the median. A median of a triangle is a line passing through a vertex that cuts the area of the triangle in half. Determining the analogs for more complicated polygons turns out to be a very fascinating activity. Try finding those lines for the shapes on page 15. They start out easy, and then require more and more ingenuity as you move down the page. They are sort of like potato chips--bet you can't eat just one!

The latest Girls Angle bulletin also features a story written by MIT senior Maria Monks about the adventures of a young mathematician named Emmy Newton. Maria writes in a way that invites the reader to solve the puzzle along with--or even before--Emmy does. Congratulations to Maria, who has won many honors, including Honorable Mention for the 2010 AMS/MAA/SIAM Morgan Prize for outstanding research in mathematics by an undergraduate. She will be giving a talk on her research at the Joint Math Meetings in San Francisco next month.

Who can resist the mathematical treasure hunts included in the pages of this issue? If you think you can solve the one on page 10, you are invited to send your solution into the journal. You could, of course, take the easy way out and use a calculator to solve it, but students may discover many beautiful ideas if they take their time and think through the problem in a different way. Our middle school math circle students who heard me talk about bimal last fall may especially enjoy thinking through a part of the problem that intially looks long and computationally messy--but it isn't really, once you think about the meaning of bimal(bimal is the binary analog of decimal notation.)

Kudos to the creators of this excellent bulletin. There's much more packed in the issue that looks fascinating and promising as well. Back issues are also available on-line in their archive here. There are many more treasures there.

the generosity of math team captains

Brian Hamrick, cocaptain of the legendary powerhouse Thomas Jefferson High School math team writes:

Winning is great fun when it happens, but it shouldn't go to your head and you should be focusing on learning first, winning second (if even that). I have made the math team wiki public for that reason: I would rather have our competitors know much of what we know and give us a good contest than have a trophy on my shelf.

Thomas Jefferson has made available a huge set of great resources here.

Winter break suggestions

Winter break is a great time for students to discover the joys of recreational math reading. Here are some suggestions which can delight students from middle school through the rest of their lives. The books below are classics. Many should be available in public libraries and/or inexpensively in used copies on the Internet.

Mathematical People and More Mathematical People have many delightful stories of the lives of noted 20th century mathematicians. Anyone who thinks mathematicians lead boring lives is in for a surprise when they read these interviews. Magic card tricks, chess puzzles, juggling, trampolines, and Mad Magazine all figured into the lives and mathematical development of one or more of these colorful characters.

Richard Feynman was a physicist, but his funny autobiographical works (What do you care what other people think? and Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman.) make many references to his unorthodox mathematical education.

Raymond Smullyan's mathematical logic puzzle books (What is the name of this book? and The Lady or The Tiger and many more treasures along those lines) are also great fun.



Martin Gardner's Aha! Insight and Aha! Gotcha! books are great "entry-level drugs" into his abundant collection of recreational math books. You can see our well-worn copy above--the wear and tear reflects its extensive reading and re-reading over the years.

Alexandra Schmidt, math teacher and MATHCOUNTS coach at Hebrew Academy of the Capital District, recommends The Man Who Counted.

If your library uses the Dewey system, try browsing around 510 or 793. If your library uses the Library of Congress numbering system, try browsing around the QA93 section.

You are likely to find some real treats.