George School's new math team gets national ranking By MICHAEL MACAGNONE STAFF WRITER | Posted: Monday, December 8, 2014 1:00 am Students at the George School in Middletown have gone a little mad for math. A group of kids at the private Quaker high school convinced Kevin Moon, the head of the math department, to start a math team so they could compete in national Math Madness, a contest held by the Math Association of America. “We wanted to do something more, other than what we got in the class,” said sophomore Bill Cui. The journey began in September, when three students petitioned the school to start the team, and got together a minimum team of five students for that first competition. The team has since grown to 18 students, with a few others participating here and there. Now the team is ranked 37th out of 384 teams nationwide. That surprised Moon. “The kids did well under a lot of pressure,” he said. The students were placed in Division 1 in October after round­robin placement matches. Then, last month, the team advanced through the first three rounds of a competition before being ousted by a team from Takoma Park Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland. The tournament is ongoing, with the last four teams slated to compete next week. For the competition, the teams’ students go into a Web application called In­ter­stel­lar, which has eight problems for each round. The students on both teams work individually on the problems, and the team score is determined by the number of questions the top five scorers get right. The questions vary from probability to trigonometry to geometry, and the students said the wording of many questions is tricky.
Some of the questions could also be tricky for students for whom English isn’t their native tongue, such as this one: Two fair six­sided dice are rolled. What is the probability that the product of the number showing is a whole number multiple of the sum of the numbers showing? (The answer to that one? 5/36.) Senior Abigail Ireland said the questions intrigued her — more so than many in­class problems. “What I liked about it was the problems given by the competition were interesting ones; they were puzzle­type problems rather than your standard ‘solve this’ equations,” she said. Despite the tricky nature of many questions, at least one George School student excelled. Junior John Zhang ranked 32 out of more than 14,000 participants. He answered 93.5 percent of the questions correct, averaging 3 minutes and 9 seconds per question, according to the contest website. Now, the team is practicing for a new competition in the spring. As for Abigail, she said participating on the team has given her a new perspective on the subject. “Some people would be like, ‘Math team? That’s for nerds.’ But there are a lot of good people here and it’s a lot of fun,” she said.