State MATHCOUNTS highlights

Congratulations to all the terrific students from all over the state who competed at MATHCOUNTS on Saturday, and especially to the first place team, Bay Trails, whose students and coaches are shown above. Their coach will coach the New York State Team at the National MATHCOUNTS Competition to be held in Orlando Florida in May.




Allen Liu from the Bay Trails team, shown at the front center in the top photo above and at left in the photo immediately above, won first place on the individual rankings. Allen made NYS MATHCOUNTS history as the first sixth grader ever to win the state championship.



Congratulations also to all the top scorers on the written portion of the contest. Shown above are Maria Geba with eighth place trophy, Aniket Tolpadi from Albany Area Math Circle with fifth place trophy, Allen Liu with first place trophy, Richard Yip with fourth place trophy, Bailey Liao with third place trophy, and Thomas Dunbach with second place trophy. Shown below are students with the remainder of the top ten trophies. Albany Area Math Circle's Matthew Gu is at left holding the tenth place trophy. I am still not sure of the names and ranks of the remaining top ten students. (If their coaches email me with their names and ranks at mathcircle@yahoo.com, I would be happy to edit this post to recognize them here. We also hope to see many of them at NYSML next month.)




All told, Albany Area Math Circle had four students in the top 20 including Cecilia Holodak (Van Antwerp Middle School) and Philip Sun (Acadia Middle School), as well as Aniket Tolpadi from Iroquois Middle School and Matt Gu from Farnsworth Middle School.



Trophies were awarded to the top six teams. Iroquois is shown above with their sixth place team trophies and their student coach Anagha Tolpadi. Team members were Vineet Vinandula, Shreya Arora, Suman Padhi, Norman Xiong (alternate), and Aniket Tolpadi (Captain). Albany Area Math Circle member Elizabeth Parizh also helped to coach the team.

Acadia's team (shown below) was right behind Iroquois on the honor list in seventh place. Albany Area Math Circle students Felix Sun and Eric Wang coached the Acadia team, whose members included: Troy Wang, David Luo, Jerry Qu, and Philip Sun.



Van Antwerp also finished very well, placing on the honor list in the top third of the participating teams. The photo below shows Albany Area Math Circle student coach Dave Bieber with team captain/high scorer Cecilia Holodak and Martin Shreiner. Other students on their team includes Rajesh Bollapragada and William Wei.




Other students from our middle school math circles competing at state included Jien Ogawa from Home Educators Enrichment Group and Thomas Glozman from Maple Avenue Middle School in Saratoga Springs (Tri-County Chapter.) We are proud of all of you.




NOTE: The results above did not come directly from the computer-printed scoresheets handed out after the contest, because those sheets had some errors and inconsistencies. I have still not received a clear and consistent top 20 student and team list from NYS MATHCOUNTS officials, but I know the reputation of the veteran scoring team and I am confident they carefully checked the results for the top team and top four students very carefully by hand before the trophies were handed out. I used coaches' notes and photos from the awards ceremony to reconstruct the results above. Other coaches are invited to let me know of any errors or omissions in my reporting by sending email to mathcircle@yahoo.com.