The Palo Alto math team has continued a year of success and excellence by winning the Bay Area Mathematical Olympiad held Feb. 21, at San Francisco State University.
Though the team competed three weeks ago, the awards ceremony did not take place until Sunday, March 7, when the team found out that it placed first overall and collected numerous individual awards.
In the 11th/12th grade division, senior Lynnelle Ye, president of the Math Club, did the best overall and received first place, while junior Nathan Pinsker received an honorable mention. Former Paly student John Boyle, who graduated early and would have been a junior, took third place. In the ninth/10th grade division, freshmen Jeffrey Yan and Jeffrey Ling got second place and an honorable mention, respectively.
The Bay Area Math Olympiad is an annual competition open to all middle and high school students and consists of a few hard problems which competitors need to prove true.
“BAMO problems are proof-writing problems which require a lot of creativity, and they give you four hours for five problems–so they’re supposed to be difficult,” said Ye, who solved four of the five questions.
This proof-writing format for the competition, instead of a usual multiple choice exam, allows competitors to really understand and delve into the problem instead of rushing through a test with many questions. Some preferred this style of competition.
“The problems were hard enough so that you needed to really play with them for a long time to crack them, but not too hard so that you can’t make any progress,” sophomore Nassim Fedel said.
“It was difficult, but with so much time to think, you can really explore the problems,” added sophomore Mark Nishamura. “I prefer this to faster contests where there is more of a time crunch.”
Because the questions do not emphasize one particular method of getting to the right answer, the scoring metric is much more complicated than a simple “correct or incorrect” metric. Thus, the committee in charge of the competition takes the highest sum of each team’s top three scores, which happened to belong to the Paly team.
Even so, the victory required a team effort from everyone involved.
“Nassim Fedel, Mark Nishimura, [and freshmen] Allen Zheng and Steven Hu also did well enough to contribute to our participation score, [which] requires solving at least one problem,” Ye said.
Paly team members used both their general knowledge of mathematics and time spent participating in Math Club and attending the Advanced Problems Solving course offered after school at Paly to tackle the tough test.
The next big competition is the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, which is the follow-up test for those who passed the cut-off in the American Mathematics Contest. The exam, which took place on Tuesday, offered Paly mathematicians another chance to add to this season’s repertoire of success.