Harvard MIT Math Tournament travel teams

Our Albany Area Math Circle HMMT travel team names celebrate the contributions of three distinguished researchers from our area:

Charles Proteus Steinmetz 1865-1923

Frank Albert Benford 1883-1948

Katharine Burr Blodgett 1898-1979

Albany Area Math Circle-Steinmetz team

Matthew Babbitt
Ashley Cho
Gurtej Kanwar
Paul Rapoport
Schuyler Smith
Wyatt Smith
Felix Sun
Jay White


Albany Area Math Circle-Benford team

George Gelashvili
Cecilia Holodak
Preston Law
Zubin Mukerjee
Elizabeth Parizh
Gili Rusak
Aniket Tolpadi
Jason Xu


Albany Area Math Circle-Blodgett team

Ryan Cheu
Matt Gu
Satjiv Kanwar
Justina Liu
Isaac Malsky
Luxi Peng
Philip Sun
Laura Tang

Happy Prime New Year!

Jim Tanton tweets:



If you start to look for other primes that are also average primes, you may stumble into some fascinating conjectures related to various forms of the Goldbach conjecture.

Pat Ballew also blogs about fascinating properties of 2011:

Well, it's the first prime day (the 2nd day of the year 2011) of a prime year that is the sum of a prime number of consecutive primes. In fact, it can be written as the sum of a prime number of consecutive prime numbers in at least two ways. The easy one is 2011 = 661+673+677, the other one that I know takes eleven consecutive primes...find it..I have been told there is not a year that can be expressed as a sum of successive primes in more than two ways for over a thousand more years That, my mathematical readers, is a lot of primes.

2003 was the last prime year, and it had the special property that the sum of its digits was also prime... not true for 2011.

Both 2017 and 2027 will be prime, but only 2027 is expressible as the sum of consecutive primes, but not a prime number of them.2081 is the next year that will be, like 2011, a prime that is the sum of a prime number of consecutive primes. If you forget, I'll remind you on Jan 2nd of that year... guess I better start working on a healthier diet... let's see, that will make me .... WOW, that IS a big number....
So what is the next year that can be expressed as a sum of consecutive primes starting with two... 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 ...... ????

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.

Happy Holidays!

I have received a few holiday gifts I'd like to share with you:

1) A beautiful video from Ken Fan at Girls Angle



The program Ken used to make the video above is a free open source 3D creation suite you can use too. Available at www.blender.org

2) A pointer from Melissa Smith of the Ithaca Math Circle to a great article by Nate and Sam Cornell. Nate is a psychologist at Williams College and Sam is a writer in San Francisco. Their article really accorded with decades of experience for me as a lifelong educator who continues to love her own learning challenges.

Here is a link to the article:
A Really Hard Test Really Helps Learning: Challenging tests and falling short may be hard on the ego, but they can do more than mere studying for eventually getting it right

Here's an excerpt that especially struck Melissa and resonated well with me also:

Both studies independently indicate a striking fact. We tend to assume that the best way to consume and remember information is through the application of rigorous, extended study. What we fail to see, however, is that the process of trying to work through a problem to which we don’t know the answer focuses our attention on it in a way that simply studying it does not. The desire to get the answer right, and the frustration of failure, is partly to account.

But there’s another element as well. When we struggle to learn something, and fail, the moment we finally get the answer it imprints itself more deeply on our mind than it would have had struggle and failure not preceded it.

3) Excellent advice from mathematician Lillian Pierce, currently at the Institute for Advanced Study: Try again! Fail again! Fail better!

4) A random factaroony from Number Gossip: 2011 is the first odious prime number we've had since 1999. For more about "odious" and "evil" numbers, see here.

5) And one last present (especially nice during those bleak and gloomy times when it feels like winter may never end ... or when it feels that a problem may never get solved.) A hat tip to the Metroplex Math Circle for calling my attention to this enchanting video. Double-click on the video for a bigger view to see the whole picture.



For more about the mathematics behind this video, see this website.

And remember ... just as sometimes the most unpromising-looking larvae can turn into the most exquisite and magical dragonflies, so too can the most hopeless looking math problems turn into the most awesome aha! experiences.

May 2011 be filled with many wonderful problems and discoveries! And many wonderful mathematical friends with whom to share them!

AMC8 Congratulations!

Congratulations to all the Albany Area middle school students who embraced the challenge of the AMC8 with such enthusiasm this year! Congratulations as well to our high school students who have mentored many of them.

Honor Roll (scores of 18 to 21)

18 Alex Cao Shaker JHS
18 Alex Wei Van Antwerp MS
20 Patrick Chi Iroquois MS
20 Gideon Schmidt Iroquois MS
21 Shreya Arora Iroquois MS
21 Andrei Akhmetov Van Antwerp MS
21 Alicia Chen Farnsworth MS
21 Zach Benson Hebrew Academy of the Capital District
21 Sean Setzen Hebrew Academy of the Capital District


Honor Roll of Distinction (scores of 22 to 25)

23 Gili Rusak Shaker JHS
24 Philip Sun Acadia MS
24 William Wang Farnsworth MS
25 Ziqing (Bill) Dong Farnsworth MS

We will post additional honor scores here as we receive information about them.

Bill Dong's perfect paper of 25 is extremely unusual--there have been many years when there are no 25's anywhere in the entire state. It is all too easy for even the strongest students to make mistakes on a test like the AMC8, as many of our veteran high school students and alumni can tell you!

Bill joins a very rarefied group of students--Albany Area Math Circle's only previous perfect scorers on the AMC8 have been Raju Krishnamoorthy (1999), Drew Besse (2001), Schuyler Smith (2006), and Matthew Babbitt (2007).

Bill will also receive the AMC8 high scorer in the state award, as did Raju, Drew, Schuyler, and Matthew, as well as Andrew Ardito and Dave Bieber.

Students who would like to prepare for next year can find lots of old AMC8, AMC10, and AMC12 test problems, along with hints and solutions free and online at this webpage.

Fall Middle School Math Meets

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the success of our inaugural season of Fall Math Meets! Watching you smile and make new mathematical friends and share cool math as you talked over the problems together after the contest is what makes it all worthwhile for us volunteer advisors.

There are many ways to measure success--we recognize a few of them here, but the ultimate measure of success is whether you continued thinking about and talking over the new ideas you learned afterwards.

October High Scorers:

8 points:
Zachary Benson, Sophie Rich, Helen Yuan

9 points:
Emily Honen, Jeffrey Shen, Cathy Shi, Max Thomas

10 points:
Bill Dong, Thomas Glozman, Ben Salem, Gideon Schmidt, Philip Sun, William Wang

"Whole is more than the sum of the parts" team award:
Adam, Emily, Jerry, Max


November High Scorers:

6 points:
Zachary Benson, Gwenda Law, Michelle Yu

9 points:
Alex Cao, Patrick Chi, Jerry Qu, Gideon Schmidt, William Wang

10 points:
Alicia Chen, Bill Dong, Philip Sun, Alex Wei

High scoring newcomer award:
Samuel Enriquez, Rafi Nizam, Jason Tang, Michael Zhu

"Whole is more than the sum of the parts" team award:
Jason, Mike, Zach


December High Scorers:

7 points:
Alex Cao, Thomas Glozman, Michelle Yu

8 points:
Bill Dong, Jerry Qu, Gideon Schmidt

10 points:
Alicia Chen, Philip Sun, William Wang, Alex Wei

High scoring newcomer award:
Sean Dory

"Whole is more than the sum of the parts" team award:
Daniel, Nabihah, Swetha, Thomas, Yang

In memoriam: Joel Brainard

Our thoughts and hearts go out to Joel's daughter, Katherine Brainard, a founding member of our math circle, and to Joel's wife, JC Glendinning, an important driving force behind the beginnings of our math circle in 2001, and to their entire family.

Joel Pennington Brainard, 71, died peacefully on December 11, 2010, at NY Presbyterian Hospital in New York, NY. He is survived by his wife Jane Carol Glendinning; their children, Junior, 29, Katherine, 25, and Scott, 23; and his brothers Charles and William. A graduate of Oberlin College, Joel served in the Peace Corp in the Ivory Coast and later taught mathematics at Talladega College in Alabama. With advanced degrees from MIT and Cornell University, Joel was an engineer on energy conservation projects at Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island and was a consultant on public utility issues for the Vermont Low-Income Advocacy Council through Vermont Legal Aid in Burlington. His many colleagues remember him fondly for his more than 22 years of service as an economist and manager in the Office of Research at the NYS Public Service Commission. Joel was an extraordinary man whose thought, wit and kindness touched the lives of all who knew him. Family and friends remember his joy for life with deep affection. His energy and enthusiasm permeated his life, particularly his ingenious solutions of problems, both large and small. From reducing distortions in the pricing of the electrical grid to his unique approaches to car repairs, home construction, and even ski boot insulation and golf cart-to-ATV modification, Joel provided an inspiring example and will be greatly missed. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that gifts be made in Joel's memory to the Robert C. Parker School, which Joel helped found 20 years ago, or the Scleroderma Foundation, an institution which works to find treatments for an autoimmune condition that Joel fought creatively for many years. A Memorial Service will be held on Saturday, December 18th at 11:00 am at the Robert C. Parker School, 4254 West Sand Lake Rd, Wynantskill, NY.