Albany Area Math Circle helpers with Math Prize for Girls

It started with a "stuffing party" at the Union College Kenney Community Center.  Thanks to math circle volunteers Sue Bieber, Rita Biswas, Elena Dolginova, Cecilia Holodak, Catherine Miller, Zubin Mukerjee, Elizabeth Parizh; Gili, Michal, and Zvi Rusak, and Alexandra Schmidt as well as Advantage Testing administrator Tina Lesem, hundreds of Math Prize for Girls tote bags got stuffed with pencils, bluebooks, blank answer forms, hats and flowers, copies of the rules and other handouts of Math Prize information.

Gili and Catherine got to be experts at "artisanly fluffing" the fabric flowers.

Of course, hugs and giggles are inevitable when you confront stacks of hundreds of hats.

Alexandra's awesome shirt made the event even more awesome, of course.    (If you are wondering how YOU can get a shirt as awesome as hers, you need to know they are not for sale!  You have to earn one--by composing and submitting a set of your own cool original problems to MATHCOUNTS.   Both coaches and students can submit problems.  If yours are selected for their Problems of the Month feature, then you too can have a shirt like Alexandra's.  Details are here.  And bear in mind that writing your own original problems is a great way to develop your problem solving skills too!)

But I digress ...

A week later Math Prize for Girls happened at MIT--and it was also completely awesome!   The expertly and artisanly stuffed bags made the start of the day much smoother this year.    The photo at right shows lei-clad proctor Elisse Ghitelman greeting students and handing them bags with everything they would need (except, of course, for the test itself, which she distributed later.)

Later that day, Albany Area Math Circle alumni Gurtej Kanwar, Zagreb Mukerjee, Liz Simon, and Felix Sun, all college students in Cambridge now, helped out in the grading room.  The picture below shows Felix with some of the other MIT student volunteers wearing some of those artisanly fluffed flowers clipped to their hats, adding a very cheerful note to the festivities.

Albany Area Math Circle was proud to have four participants in Math Prize for Girls this year--Cecilia Holodak and Elizabeth Parizh from Niskayuna High School, Gili Rusak from Shaker, and Wanwan Fei from Emma Willard.  It was a bit crowded and chaotic after the ceremony, so we did not manage to get a photo with all our contestants and volunteers, but we did manage to get Felix, Elizabeth, Cecilia, Wanwan, and myself (with my own artisanly fluffed flower!) into a photo here:

  A special note of thanks to Albany Area Math Circle advisor, Rita Biswas, who drove all the stuffed tote bags to Cambridge, and then spent three days with us making sure that countless details of Math Prize 2011 went smoothly!

Math Circle alum wins Harvard Social Studies essay prize

In yet another demonstration of the "Do math and you can do anything!" motto, a shout-out of congratulations goes to Albany Area Math Circle alumnus Zagreb Mukerjee.

Zagreb (shown above with a middle school math circle he led during his high school years) is now a junior at Harvard concentrating in Social Studies, a unique all-honors program which requires a great deal of independent research and analytical writing.

Last week, the Harvard Social Studies department announced that Zagreb was a winner of the Mill-Taylor prize for his epistemological essay titled Utilitarianism and its Discontents.

MILL-TAYLOR PRIZE The Mill-Taylor Prize is awarded for the two best Social Studies 10 essays written by any sophomore concentrating in Social Studies. The prize is given out at the beginning of the junior year.

The apparent moral of the story: if you can explain advanced mathematics clearly enough to excite eager and enthusiastic young students, then writing an expository analytical essay on epistemology is a piece of cake.

Albany Area Math Circle student off to Russia

Congratulations to Wyatt Smith, an Albany Area Math Circle rising senior, who has demonstrated once again that our math circle students excel in a broad variety of domains.

Eleventh-grader Wyatt Smith of Clifton Park was the winner of the second annual Albany-Tula Alliance Student Essay Contest.

Smith will be traveling to Russia in September 2011 with a chaperone from the Albany-Tula Alliance for a two week stay in Tula. There he and two other contest winners will meet with other students and have an opportunity to attend classes at Lev Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical Institute.

In this year's competition, which took place in February, students ages 16 to 18 submitted 1,500 word essays on the role that the space race might play in maintaining world peace and technological cooperation.

Albany Area Math Circle in Ghana!

Albany Area Math Circle advisor Bill Babbitt has just returned from a trip to Ghana where he was part of a team headed up by RPI Professor Ron Eglash. There, they worked with students at Ayeduasi School, using software they had developed to introduce the mathematical concepts of rotation, translation, dilation, reflection, and iteration in contexts of cornrow and kente cloth design. Here are two of the students displaying the design they had created:



There is a detailed account of Mr. Babbitt's mathematical adventures in Ghana on his blog here.

Albany Area Math Circle student speaks at national math circle conference

The National Association of Math Circles recently posted selected videos from their annual national meeting this spring in Houston.

One of their videos features a presentation given by Albany Area Math Circle member Elizabeth Parizh on the social aspects of math circles:

Math Clubs and Their Social Aspect:
A View Inside and Out
Elizabeth Parizh

Many children today are put off from participating in math activities because it is not popular among school kids. I will describe my own experiences as both a coach and a student in such math clubs, and explains what it is like for kids, and especially girls. I find that this is a very important problem that needs to be solved, because these students are America’s future and need to be prepared to help their country prosper. And yes, this does require math.

Elizabeth's talk was very well received, though unfortunately the videographer's microphone was placed to pick up more of the crowd reaction than of Elizabeth's voice (which came through quite clearly in person.) Her slides are available here.



The other talks and activities at the meeting were also excellent and several of the other featured videos are available here.

Elizabeth also assisted Bard College Professor Japheth Wood in leading sessions on the theory of impartial games designed for middle school and high school teachers. They used the game of Nim to illustrate the ideas of game trees, strategy, and concepts such as the addition of games. More details of that activity, including handouts, are available here. Professor Wood leads the Kingston Math Circle to our south--you may also want to check out his blog, News from the Math Wizard.

Albany Area Math Circle representatives at Math Prize for Girls

Congratulations to the four Albany Area Math Circle students who have qualified for invitations to the Math Prize for Girls to be held at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 17. They are all four outstanding representatives of all that is best in our math circle: massive enthusiasm for tackling mathematical challenges and eagerness to share their mathematical knowledge with others in our community.

From left to right above are:

Elizabeth Parizh, a rising junior at Niskayuna High School

Gili Rusak, a rising freshman at Shaker High School

Cecilia Holodak, a rising sophomore at Niskayuna High School.

At lower right is Zhixin (Wanwan) Fei, a rising senior at Emma Willard School.

They are a remarkably talented and experienced group. All four are veterans who also participated in the Math Prize for Girls last year. Elizabeth, Gili, and Cecilia have all participated in MATHCOUNTS, NYSML, ARML, and the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament.



Elizabeth has been student coaching at Iroquois Middle School. She was one of only a few high school students across the country invited to join adult math circle leaders at the annual national meeting of the National Association of Math Circles which took place at the University of Houston this March, where she gave an excellent and very well-received presentation on her experiences both as a student in a math circle and also as a coach of younger students. The audience for her presentation were mostly adult leaders of math circles, many of whom remarked to me afterwards how helpful her perspective was to them. At the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival associated with that meeting, Elizabeth also participated as an apprentice to Bard College Professor Japheth Wood, helping him lead a session on game theory based on the Game of Nim. Elizabeth was an AIME qualifier this year.

Gili was the second highest scoring 8th grader from anywhere in the US or Canada at Math Prize 2010, was among the top 10 in the state at the state MATHCOUNTS championship this year, and was already among our top high school students in 7th and 8th grade on contests such as AIME and HMMT. She plans to student coach younger students next year.

Cecilia also plans to student coach younger students next year. Her many honors include being the first girl in a decade to win the CountDown Round at the Chapter MATHCOUNTS contest and being part of a four person Science Bowl team that placed 7th in the country at the National Science Bowl event in Washington, DC last year.

Wanwan qualified for AIME this year on the AMC12. Last year, she was the highest scorer on the AMC10 of anyone in this area, male or female, and she was also among the five highest scoring girls anywhere in the state on that contest. She is among a group of Emma Willard students who have been discussing launching a math mentoring program for younger girls in the future, an exciting initiative for our area.

Upstate NY ARML team

Congratulations to the Albany Area Math Circle students who represented Upstate New York on the all-star teams at ARML, the national high school math championships held at Penn State this weekend: Matthew Babbitt, Cecilia Holodak, Preston Law, Zubin Mukerjee, Jien Ogawa, Elizabeth Parizh, Paul Rapaport, Schuyler Smith, Felix Sun, and Jay White joined a stellar group of math students from other parts of Upstate New York to do our region proud.

As usual, the problems were extremely challenging--indeed, the veteran members of the problem writing committee cheerfully admit that some of them get zeroes on the contests when taking them for practice as part of the development process!

Special congratulations to Allen Liu, a seventh grader from the Rochester area, who got 9 out of 10 correct on the individual round and ranked 10th in the country after tiebreaks!

Congrats as well to team high scorers Schuyler Smith and Felix Sun, veteran seniors who managed to get 7 out of 10 correct for team high scorer honors.