Around the POND
b “One of the things that
makes this place so special is the pride we have in each
other’s achievement,” Headmaster Willy MacMullen ’78 said in welcoming the following scholars to the Cum Laude Society last fall: Seniors Ai Thi Minh Bui, Natasha Yasmine Cheung, Lidia Gutu, Isabelle E. Homberg, Xinran Huang, Kayla Marie Kim (missing from photo), Audrey Chi Hei Lam, Jae Hong Lee, Lanting Lu, Michael Rousseau Molder, Brian Alexander Tomasco, Leon Alexander Vortmeyer, Hannah Kathryn Wilczynski, Alexander Jusuf Yan, Yiwei Zhang.
Taft Students Shine in International Competitions Six Taft students traveled to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, last fall to compete against more than 700 students from 130 school and regional teams in the biannual Harvard-MIT Math Tournament (HMMT). First held in 1998, HMMT is considered one of the most prestigious high school math competitions in the world. In recent years, teams have represented more than 20 states and five continents. Team Red Rhinos was coached by math teacher Ted Heavenrich and included Ivory Zhu ’17, Yejin Kim ’18, Steve Le ’19, Sonny An ’17, Daniel Yi ’18, and Ton Kosolpatanadurong ’16. The team finished 13th overall, second among teams representing schools; Exeter was both the first school and the overall winner of the tournament for the fourth consecutive year. In the morning, competitors took a 50-minute individual general knowledge test, then a 50-minute individual themed test. Of the more than 700 individual competitors, Ivory finished 34th on the first test, and Sonny finished 19th on the second. After a break, the competition resumed with a one-hour team test where all six team members were allowed to collaborate and, Heavenrich explained, “divvy up the problems.”
“We finished 11th out of 130 teams on this portion,” said Heavenrich. “The most exciting part wraps up the contest in the afternoon after lunch. It is 80 minutes, and it is called the Guts round. The team is in a big lecture hall, and there is live scoring on the screen at the front of the room. Each team has one runner who brings a set of three problems back to the team. You cannot get the next set of three problems until you turn in answers for the previous set. The team needs to balance speed, accuracy, and self-knowledge. The problems get harder, but are worth more, as you progress through the rounds. A weaker team should not be in a hurry, because by the fifth or sixth round (of 12) they will have little chance of getting any of the problems correct. On the other hand, a strong team should push through the early rounds, even at the risk of making a careless error or two, in order to get to the higherpoint problems which they can still do.” At the end of the daylong competition, Ivory secured the 28th spot overall in the field of 700, Ton was 59th, and Sonny 62nd. For Sonny, HMMT was his second major academic competition of the fall. Sonny was named a regional finalist in the 2015 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Launched by the Siemens Foundation in 1999, the
event is considered the nation’s premier competition in the STEM arena. Nearly 4,000 students registered for this year’s competition; 3,162 projects were submitted for consideration, and 466 students were named semifinalists and 97 were named regional finalists, Sonny being among that elite group. The students presented their research in a closed, online forum; entries were judged at the regional level by esteemed scientists at six leading research universities that host the regional competitions: Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Notre Dame, and the University of Texas at Austin. Working under the tutelage of mentor and Hofstra University Mathematics Professor Dan Ismailescu, Sonny teamed up with Kobe Ko from Cushing Academy to present a project based on the Euclidean Ramsey Theorems. Their project focused on the cases of 3,4,5 colorings, and their use in explaining natural phenomena that are constructed in certain patterns, and how they might make things like designing a subway blueprint more efficient. Sonny and Kobe “believe that STEM is intended to understand the world in simple, logical fashion.” j Taft Bulletin / Winter 2016
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