Some people get their thrills from exploring unchartered territories, climbing Mount Everest, jumping out of airplanes, hunting wild boar in India, swimming the English Channel. Those people join the Outing Club. Others prefer the more cerebral pursuits of factoring the seemingly unfactorable, solving for the unknown variable, or finding the missing angle. They join the Math Club.
On Saturday, Nov. 14, 12 members of the Westminster Math Club traveled to MIT to compete against the best and brightest math students from all over the country at the 2015 Harvard-MIT Math Tournament. The Westminster Black team was comprised of Hayden Cathcart ’18, Albert Gao ’18, Cindy Jeong ’17, Wonjune Kang’16, Minh Nguyen ’16 and Yuna Lee ’19. Members of the Westminster Gold team were Mike Riberdy ’18, Connor Seeley ’18, Mary Su ’18, Matthew Swenson ’17, Artur Szopa ’17 and Leona Zhang ’18.
The problems they wrestled with are not for the faint of heart. They were designed by MIT and Harvard undergrads, and are quite different from the ones found in a traditional high school mathematics textbook. For example, find numbers a, b, c and d such that a3 + b4 + c5 = d11.
Up first were two rounds of individual problem-solving, followed by the team round,in which each group worked together on 10 formidable problems. The day finished with the fast and furious Guts Round, whereby teams worked on increasingly difficult problems, with the scoring done in real time.
For lunch, the group met up with last year’s Math Club president and four-time participant in the tournament, Tom Dudzik ’15, now a freshman at MIT. Albert Gao was the top finisher for the Martlets in the individual rounds, with a ranking of 55 out of over 850 students.
In the team round, the Black and Gold teams came in 46th and 112th, respectively. In the guts round, they came in 65th and 127th.
Math Club advisor and chauffeur, Dan Aber, said, “It was a great day for these 12 Westminster Mathletes who spent the day solving math problems solely for the challenge and thrill of coming up with the correct answer. They represented their school with grit and grace.”
