NYSML Appreciation

We all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to UAlbany Prof. Biswas and Albany Area Math Circle advisor Mr. Babbitt, the co-chairs of our Host Site Committee, for the months of work and planning they have put into making our dreams and vision for hosting NYSML a reality. When Albany Area Math Circle started up in 2001, Prof. Moorthy and I never dreamed we would see our tiny math circle flourish to the point of hosting NYSML, let alone fielding three teams of awesome students.



We are also grateful to our wonderful supporting team of alumnae, parent, and community volunteers, without whose efforts this NYSML would not be possible:

Site Committee Housing Coordinator: Dr. Susan Bieber

Alumnae General Factota: Catherine Miller and Beth Schaffer

Greeters: Elena Dolginova, Nancy Newman, Suzanne Rapoport

Lead Zone Proctor: Alexandra Schmidt, Hebrew Academy of the Capital District

Zone Proctors: Eric & Susan Bieber, Dave Holodak, Rupinder Kanwar, Shuang Liu, Debby Pelky, Lois & Richard Rubin, David & Nancy Rudinger, Anil & Anjana Tolpadi

Lapboard/Clipboard Czar: Charles Law

Scoring Room: Eileen and Tony Ardito, Elaine Hickey; Prof. Moorthy (Power Question grader)

We are deeply grateful to UAlbany for its hospitality, to the many UAlbany administrators and staffers who have worked with us for many months to make our vision and dreams for this NYSML a reality, especially Diane Dumesnil of the College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering and to Roman Dubiel of Undergraduate Admissions, as well as to Mary Tarsa, Lisa Scholz and Sally Mills of the School of Business.

We also deeply appreciate our awesome team of sponsors:

Thanks to our sponsors:

The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE)



The Bieber Family

UAlbany Undergraduate Admissions

The New York City Math Teachers Circle

Art of Problem Solving

Tough Traveler®

Sustaining Friends and Families of Albany Area Math Circle:

Robert P. Ingalls, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, Mary O'Keeffe,
Ardito family, Babbitt family, Bieber family, Biswas-Mukerjee family, Hickey family, Guo family, Kaur family, Law family, Lesh-Shreiner family, Liu family, Liu-Gu family, Parizh family, Pelkey family, Reitz family, Scheib-Holodak family, Smith family, Sun family, Tanadve family, Tolpadi family, Wang family, White family

Contributing Families of Albany Area Math Circle:

Buff family, Cao family, Chen family, Foyt family, Hammar family, Hsu family, Ingalls family, Job family, Li family, Magai family, Monteith family, Ogawa family, Parower family, Rapaport family, Richman family, Rubin family, Rusak family, Soedjak family, Wajda family, Xu family

NYSML 2010 Top Team Results

Here are the results for top team honors for the 2010 New York State Math League math meet championship held yesterday at the University at Albany.

A Division Honors:

New York City's teams from Brooklyn/Staten Island, Manhattan, and Queens/Bronx took first place A-division honors at NYSML with scores of 269/261/255.

Albany Area Math Circle A took second place honors in the A division with a score of 245.*

Nassau County A took third place honors in the A division with a score of 236.

B-division Honors:

B division honors went to Dutchess-Ulster-Sullivan Orange (DUSO) A in first place with 177, Alternate 1 in second with 171, and Westchester Putnam B in third place with 146.

Ithaca High School ranked fourth in the B-division, only one point behind Westchester-Putnam B and received most improved honors for its score of 145. Albany Area Math Circle's two B-division teams, Octahedra and Tetrahedra, ranked next with scores of 133 and 132.

Bergen County AAST:



Bergen County Academy for the Advancement of Science & Technology (AAST) in New Jersey also had three teams participating in the meet. Bergen AAST Mu A turned in an outstanding performance of 267 points, right behind NYC Brooklyn/Staten Island.

Complete results for all 27 teams competing in the meet will soon be available at www.nysml.com. Congratulations to all participating teams and coaches.

*Thanks to a very gracious proposal made by NYC Head Coach Jim Cocoros last year, and adopted by a vote of NYSML members at last year's meeting, there is now a "no duplicate awards policy" for top team honors. This means that any given league may only win one set of honors. Thus all three of New York City's top ranking teams share first place honors.

NYSML team rosters

Albany Area Math Circle A

Andrew Ardito heeg (Captain)
David Bieber Niskayuna High School (Coordinator)
Matthew Babbitt heeg
Shiwen (Heidi) Chen Emma Willard School
So yeun (Ashley) Cho Emma Willard School
Peixuan Guo Bethlehem High School
Gurtej Kanwar Bethlehem High School
Preston Law heeg
Zubin Mukerjee Guilderland High School
Paul Rapoport Albany Academy
Schuyler Smith heeg
Felix Sun Shenendahoah High School
Eric Wang Shenendahoah High School
Jay White heeg
Jason Xu Niskayuna High School


Albany Area Math Circle Octahedra

Anagha Tolpadi Niskayuna High School (Captain)
Noah Rubin Guilderland High School(Coordinator)

Shreya Arora Iroquois Middle School

Cecilia Holodak Van Antwerp Middle School
PeiTing Hsu Emma Willard School
Ann Job Shaker High School
Arun Job Shaker High School
Beatrice Malsky Guilderland High School
Isaac Malsky Farnsworth Middle School
Elizabeth Parizh Niskayuna High School
Noah Rubin Guilderland High School
Ved Tanavde Guilderland High School
William Wang Farnsworth Middle School
Yuqing Wu Emma Willard School



Albany Area Math Circle Tetrahedra

Brady Pelkey Hudson Falls High School (Captain)
Wyatt Smith heeg (Coordinator)
Matthew Gu Farnsworth Middle School
Greg Hickey Shaker High School
Gabriel Holodak Niskayuna High School
Bradley Johnson Niskayuna High School
David Luo Acadia Middle School

Jien Ogawa heeg
Adam Parower Shaker High School
Gili Rusak Shaker Junior High School
Philip Sun Acadia Middle School
Aniket Tolpadi Iroquois Middle School
Troy Wang Acadia Middle School
Isaac Smith heeg

You are an amazing community of students. Your advisors delight in the joy we have seen in you take in your collaborative problem solving at our weekly meetings and in the bonds of friendship and camaraderie we have seen form over the years. We hope to add additional students to fill Octahedra and Tetrahedra out to full strength, and we have confidence that you will welcome them and make them feel at home. (UPDATE: Thanks to DUSO Alternate Emily Shebby and Westchester Alternates Andrew Huang and Dan Herman for filling out Tetrahedra and Octahedra to full strength.)

We are proud of you, and we are proud of your veteran leadership team: Andrew, Dave, Anagha, Noah, Brady, and Wyatt.

If you are looking for help or directions at NYSML

Here's how to find the people who can help you.

Our small army of volunteers will be wearing distinctive badges like the ones on the table above, made by our awesome sponsor Tough Traveler, in their Schenectady factory.



Some of them, like our Lead Zone Proctor Alexandra Schmidt, a math teacher from Hebrew Academy of the Capital District, also like to wear math t-shirts, so they'll be wearing the same light blue Albany Area Math Circle T-shirts that our students wear to help them stand out doubly from the crowd.



Our UAlbany student guides will carry pennants that look like this:



If you are looking for definitive answers to those all important questions like "Where is our team's classroom?" or "Where is the gym?" or "Where is the restroom?" or "Where am I supposed to be right now?" or "The light went out in our classroom? How do we get it turned back on" or "How long until lunch?" or "Why is there no proctor in our classroom yet?" or "I am an alternate, but I don't remember what team I'm supposed to be working with?" these folks can help you.

If your question relates to the UAlbany campus (like location of buildings and restrooms), your campus guides with the purple and gold Athena pennants are the best go-to people. If you question relates to the NYSML contest (like "Where am I supposed to be right now?" the folks with the Tough Traveler badges are the best bet.) For the most challenging questions, look for volunteers like Alexandra who are wearing light blue math circle shirts AND Tough Traveler badges.



These awesome volunteers will either know the answer to your questions OR they will know how to contact someone who can answer them!

Thanks to all our great volunteers.

Albany Area Math Circle students: NYSML information

We are inviting a few excellent students from our area to fill out our Albany Area Math Circle Tetrahedra and Octahedra teams to full strength. Here is some basic guidance and orientation for them. Veterans and team leaders, please read this as well and be prepared to fill in the gaps so all students on your team can have an outstanding experience at NYSML!

A brief outline of the day:

7 a.m. to 8:15 Campus Center Food Court Plan to arrive before 8 to check in with your team leadership, which will be sitting at the round table at the base of the steps leading down to the basement Food Court.

8:15 Go upstairs to the ballroom for the opening assembly. Teams have assigned seating areas. Look for your team signs and the light blue shirts and sit with your team!

8:30 to 8:45 Opening Assembly

8:45 to 8:55 Teams travel with their campus guides and team proctors to their assigned classroom for the Team and Power Rounds. Albany will be dismissed first, because its teams will have the furthest to travel to their assigned rooms. Albany A and Albany Octahedra are on the second floor of Social Sciences building. Albany Tetrahedra will be on the first floor of Social Sciences.

9-10:30 Team and Power Rounds. For these two rounds, the entire 15-person team works together. Each 15-person team has a classroom to itself. You may use the whiteboard or chalkboard. On the Team Round, your team will have 20 minutes to solve 10 problems with answers in short order format. On the Power Round your team will have 1 hour to solve a multipart problem. In the Power Round, your answers will be lengthy. In some cases, you will need to show your work in clear detail. In other cases, you will need to provide a proof. Less experienced students usually work on the earlier parts of the Power Round, which are more computational in nature. More experienced students usually work on the more difficult proofs in the middle and later part of the Power Round. Everyone has something to contribute!

Time to walk over to the gym for Individual and Relay Rounds. This is a good time to eat a snack or drink from your water bottle as you walk.

10:50-12:30 For these rounds, you will be sitting on bleachers using a lapboard or clipboard.

Individuals are like Targets from MATHCOUNTS, because you get one pair of questions at a time. But they are much harder! Don't be discouraged. Advice for new students: look over BOTH problems before you start working. For a new student, getting even one problem right is an accomplishment, so don't rush through both of them. Better to do one of them thoroughly and carefully, checking your work, than to rush through both and get them both wrong.

Relays--for more information about relays, see this post from last year.

http://albanyareamathcircle.blogspot.com/2009/03/blog-post.html

After Relays, you will be dismissed to walk over to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, where you will be treated to a great talk on nanotechnology by Prof. LaBella, followed by an excellent lunch.

Then back to the Campus Center for the Closing Assembly, which includes Buzz, Tiebreaks, and Awards. That closing assembly should run 2:10 to 3:30 and your parents are welcome to watch!

A few more important notes:

Whether you are a veteran or a first-timer, please read the contest rules here:

http://nysml.com/NYSML_competition_rules_2010.php

and also read this important information:

http://nysml.com/NYSMLTERMINOLOGYSHEET.pdf

If you are first-timer, please make a note of the things that are confusing to you and ask a veteran to explain it on Saturday morning before the meet starts (or ask a vet by email.)

Don't worry about the things that are completely over your head. If you haven't learned trig yet, just plan to skip over those questions, and spend your time on other questions that might be more accessible to you.

If you are a veteran, think about the rules and conventions that were confusing to you and make sure you have thought about how to explain them to newer students.

Things to bring: pencils, erasers, water bottle, snacks

Things to LEAVE HOME: your calculator! NYSML is a calculator-free zone!

Things to wear: layers (you never know about the weather/climate control), comfortable walking shoes, and your light blue team t-shirt. Wear your light blue Albany Area Math Circle t-shirt. If you don't have one, email Mr. Babbitt to let him know your size and we'll have one waiting for you with your team captain.

Thing to remember: Most importantly--encourage your teammates! The problems are hard--it's easy to get discouraged, especially when you realize you made a silly mistake
(as all of us do!)

Remember my motto: Have a good time! Make some new math friends! Share some Aha! experiences and cool insights you got between rounds. Celebrate your mistakes and learn from them.

A tradition of encouraging great problem solving in New York and Albany!

Albany Area Math Circle is proud and honored to be the host team for the 2010 New York State Math League (NYSML) state championship math meet next Saturday, April 10. Through both time and space, both New York and Albany have a proud tradition of encouraging great problem solving.

This is what a New York State license plate looked like back in early 1970s, the early years of NYSML. But the New York State math contest tradition goes back even further. A great deal of the problem solving tradition in this country traces its origins to New York City and New York State. Albany has made contributions in expanding the growth of that movement even more broadly, building mathematical bridges that have spread connections among kindred mathematical problem solvers across the state, the country, and the world.

Richard Feynman's memoirs fondly recall his times on his high school math team in his Far Rockaway, Queens during the 1930s. He won the New York City math contest held at NYU his senior of high school. Later he would go on to the Putnam Math Competition in college, and ultimately to win the Nobel Prize in physics. His many contributions to physics include pioneering roles in the fields of nanotechnology and quantum computing, so it's especially fitting that UAlbany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering is sponsoring NYSML.

By the early 1950s, the New York City math contests Richard Feynman enjoyed had expanded into a statewide contest and ultimately into the national high school math contest (AHSME) now known as the American Mathematics Competitions (AMC10/12). In 1959, the International Math Olympiad, an essay-style proof based math competition started up in Eastern Europe. At first only countries behind the Iron Curtain participated. By the early 1970s, as Cold War tensions began to ease slightly, some mathematicians wondered if American students should participate. Some feared that American students were unprepared for such a rigorous contest, that they would be demoralized and unprepared.

In the early 1970s, Professor Nura Turner of UAlbany (then called Albany State Teachers College) wrote influential articles in the American Mathematics Monthly dismissing such fears, citing the decades of New York students who had developed their problem-solving abilities through participating in city and statewide math contests. In her words, "It would be possible for us to perform such a feat. We certainly must possess here in the USA the strength of character to face defeat and the capability and courage to then plunge into systematic hard training to compete again with the desire to strive for a better showing."

The Mathematical Association of America gives UAlbany's Professor Turner's advocacy much of the credit for their decision to send the first team of American students to the International Math Olympiad (IMO) in 1974. Due to the well-established tradition of math contests in New York, those early US teams had very strong representation from New York. The first US team placed second among the 18 national teams competing in 1974 in East Berlin, and Eric Lander, the captain of the Stuyvesant High School math team, brought home a silver medal from that IMO.

He went on to win a MacArthur "genius fellowship" and is currently the President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute as well as Professor of Biology at MIT.

Professor Lander will be coming to Albany later this month to share in a prestigious prize in medicine for his work in mapping the human genome. His experiences on his New York City high school math team surely contributed to the development of his problem-solving skills as well as the teamwork skills needed to accomplish the work for which he is being honored.

We are excited to host teams of the next generation of great New York State problem-solvers in Albany this coming Saturday.

Our team sign in progress

How is your team sign for NYSML coming?

Here is Matthew Babbitt with our sign, which is still in progress. (There's an additional design element coming on this side of the sign, and both sides of the sign need to be distinctive and easy for the entire team to spot.)

If your league is sending multiple teams, you don't need to create a sign for each team, because the teams within a given league will be sticking together throughout the day. In other words, their team/power round classrooms will be near one another, they will be seated in the same area of the ballroom and gym, and so on. (But if the multiple teams within your league want to each make their own team signs, they are certain welcome to do so. More chances to win a prize for an outstanding sign!)

UPDATE: Prof Moorthy has created an excellent additional team sign, which you can see below. So now Albany Area Math Circle has two team signs. A third one would be optional but great. Note: as the host team, we will NOT be eligible for team sign awards ourselves.

Prof. Moorthy sign celebrates the fact that this is the tenth year of our Albany Area Math Circle, which started up in 2001 with just eight students, not nearly enough to form even one NYSML team.

One of those original students was Drew Besse, who was a 7th grader during the first year of Albany Area Math Circle in fall 2001. He later became a leader of Math Circle along with co-captain Beth Schaffer in 2005-2007. Drew and Beth are shown celebrating with the Albany Area Math Circle team, which won third place in the A division of 2007 NYSML, held in New York City. (Drew is at top left in the photo. Beth is second from the right in the top row.) Drew and Beth are now alumni, and Beth will be back as a volunteer at this year's NYSML, drawing on her experience as HMMT Tournament Director.

Some of the students in the 2007 picture are still members of this year's AAMC team. In particular, the entire middle row will be veterans on this year's team: Matthew Babbitt, Andrew Ardito, Eric Wang, Dave Bieber, Schuyler Smith, and Felix Sun, as well as Paul Rapoport (center of the back row.) The other students in the photo have all graduated and gone off to college, but Zagreb Mukerjee (front row left) and Yipu Wang (top row second from left) will have younger siblings participating this year. In addition, Eric, Schuyler, and Felix will all be accompanied by one or more younger siblings on this year's math circle teams.

In our first year, we could not even field a full team. This year, we expect to have three teams.

Our community has flourished and thrived across the years, with students building friendships and collaborative relationships that continue long after they have finished high school. It is delightful that many of our alumni return each year for our Memorial Day picnic. We will have one again this year. We look forward to celebrating a very special one in May.