The football field or basketball court is not the only place where groups of students show off teamwork. The math team puts in plenty of work as members strive to reach high goals this year.
“Last year we made state and did well there,” junior Jinghang Zhang said. “After that, some of us went to regionals, and I’m hoping we can do that again.”
A top 10 finish in the state takes a journey to get to, starting with practices.
“Practices happen about twice a month, and they vary in format,” senior Terence Huang said. “If we have an important contest coming up, Mr. Lehmann will give us packets of practice problems to work on. If there’s nothing coming up, we will look at interesting math topics.”
There is some teamwork involved in these practices.
“Sometimes we will meet, do some problems and go over strategies,” Zhang said. “We will go over formulas we may need or ways of problem-solving.”
Once this work is done, the team moves on to competitions that can prove to be challenging.
“There are different rounds of timed tests,” senior Minki Kim said. “There is a set of problems that you have to solve in an hour, and some are team-based. Then there are relays where the first person solves a problem that will help the next person solve theirs.”
This was a similar format to the Excellence of Mathematics competition the team participated in earlier this year at Faust Park.
“We did really well,” Zhang said. “Our school got first place for the freshman, junior and senior teams, and the sophomores got second place. We had a lot of people place individually and get awards as well.”
While this is just a taste of success, team members expect the trend to continue as they hold high hopes for the future.
“Our presence has grown stronger in the school from last year,” Huang said. “The team was mostly juniors, and we were pretty successful, but this year we’ve got quite a few more members spanning across all grade levels.”
Bigger doesn’t always necessarily mean better but, in this case, the team is more than happy to welcome the extra numbers.
“We have more experience, which will help, but we also have more underclassmen, which could be a good thing because they have more time to practice for the competitions,” Kim said.
This leaves the team with a lot of excitement heading into competitions later this year, such as the Harvard-MIT competition in February, state in April and possibly regionals in May.
Senior members, such as Huang, are excited about the team beyond this year as well.
“I strongly encourage students, underclassmen especially, to come check us out if you like math, are good at math, are looking for something to put on your college app, or just want to hang with people as ridiculously cool as me,” Huang said.