Palo Alto High School’s math club sent two teams of students to Pennsylvania to compete in the Carnegie Mellon Informatics and Mathematics Competition at Carnegie Mellon University, placing of 21st and 44th out of over 300 teams from around the nation.

The CMIMC is a math and computer science competition held by Carnegie Mellon students in late January every year since 2015.

The two teams, the Paly Green Team and the Paly White Team, consisted of six members who were chosen by their scores on a test made by the organizers of the CMIMC. Due to the high number of individual tests that had to be graded, and the heavy course load of the students at CMU, it took over an entire month to grade and release the scores from the competition.

This was the first time the Paly Math Club has participated in a competition this far away, and Arne Lim, one of the teachers who went with the mathletes, said that the whole trip was a worthwhile experience.

“I think that this was a great trip, and I hope everyone that came had a good time,” Lim said. “Paly Math Club should compete at this competition again next year.”

Jeremy Xu, a member from one of the teams, said that he enjoyed the trip, but he had to sacrifice a lot of time.

“The CMIMC competition was both fun, but it was also tiring,” Xu said. “However, when I came back I was way behind on homework because I missed a day of school. It took me like two weeks to make everything up.”

The Paly Math Club is always welcoming new members and meets on Thursday in room 863.

Below are the questions from this year’s CMIMC math competition from the official CMIMC website.