Albany Area Math Circle honors last year!

As we look forward to a new year ahead, it is fun to look back on the exciting accomplishments for our Albany Area Math Circle in 2010, and to compare those numbers to a decade ago, right before our math circle started up.

In 2010, Albany Area Math Circle students represented 17% of the Distinguished AMC12 Honor Roll students in the state, all the more impressive since the Capital Region only has about 4% of the state's population. As a measure of the impact of our math circle, it is interesting to compare our 2010 results to the results from the AMC12 contests given in 2000 and 2001, right before our math circle started up. Only 4% of the AMC12 Distinguished Honor Roll students in New York State came from our area back then!

Looking at the 2010 USAMO qualifier list paints a similarly impressive picture. Five of New York's 28 USA Math Olympiad (USAMO) qualifiers (18%) were Albany Area Math Circle students in 2010. By contrast, back in 2000 and 2001, before our math circle started up, there was only one USAMO qualifier from our area, 5% of the total number in those years. For almost two decades prior to 2000, there had been zero USAMO qualifiers in our area.

The annual AMC Honor Roll book has just become available here. Screenshots of a few especially noteworthy pages from the book are below:



The excerpt above comes from pages 50-51, which lists the top 5 teams in each of the ten regions in the US and Canada. AAMC was tied for second place team in our region (New York/NJ) in 2010! Back in 2000 and 2001, a composite AMC12 team based on the strongest three students in the Capital District would have been 50 to 60 points behind first place Stuyvesant. This year, our math circle team was only 3 points behind Stuyvesant (and looking only at the AMC12B date contest, our math circle team actually beat Stuyvesant's team by 9 points!)



Pages 57-59 list the top 10 individuals in each of the ten regions in the US and Canada, as well as the top-scoring 9th grader in each region. As you can see from the screenshot above, Albany Area Math Circle had two of the top 10 individuals in our NY-NJ region, and we also had the highest scoring 9th grader in the region!

"But wait, there's more!" (as they say on those late night TV infomercials.) Albany Area Math Circle students placing on the AMC12 Distinguished Honor Roll are highlighted in yellow below (note that some of our members are listed under their schools where they took the tests):



Congratulations as well to all math circle students listed on the AMC12 Honor Roll on pages 91 to 94: Paul Rapaport (Albany Academy), Heidi Chen (Emma Willard), Zubin Mukerjee (Guilderland), Aniket Tolpadi and Jason Xu (Niskayuna), Adam Parower and Gili Rusak (Shaker), Felix Sun (Shendandehoah), and Jay White (homeschooler).

And shout-outs as well to our Upstate New York friends in the Ithaca Math Circle! They are off to an awesome running start! A search on "Ithaca" in the AMC Honor Roll book reveals 18 instances of their students listed on the honor lists. We will have a post highlighting their math circle coming soon.