This past weekend, the Diana Nichols Math Invitational brought together 315 students from 15 Bay Area schools. Harker teams earned first place in the grade 6 and grade 7 categories, and placed third in the grade 7 and grade 8 categories. In the grade 6 individual competition, George Wehner took first place and Sidra Xu took third. In grade 7 individual competition, Allison Jia placed second and Grace Huang placed fourth. Cindy Wang and Alexander Young took second and fourth place, respectively, in the individual grade 8 competition. In the estimation contest, in which students guessed the total number of pages contained in a collection of nine books, Jia’s guess of 5,729 pages was amazingly close to the actual number of 5,740.
In other math news, National Assessment & Testing announced on Feb. 24 that Harker had taken fifth place out of 25 participating schools in the 2015 Four-by-Four Competition. This contest involves teams of four solving four problems, challenging each team to not only solve all four problems in 10 minutes, but also to choose which member will handle each question. There are three high school divisions, with placement based on the sum of the grade levels of the team members: Rock, Paper and Scissors.
Stand-out teams in the competition were the Paper division team of Kai-Siang Ang, grade 10, David Zhu, grade 10, Lawrence Li, grade 11, and Allison Wang, grade 11, who placed second. The two-person team of Richard Yi, grade 11, and Swapnil Garg, grade 9, took first place in the Rock division; the team of Ray Yuan Song, grade 10, Justin Jia, grade 10, Rajiv Movva, grade 9, and Michael Kwan, grade 9, tied for fifth in the same division.
Meanwhile, 33 Harker students took the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) exam and qualified for the American Invitational Math Exam (AIME), to be held March 9. The qualifying students were seniors Matthew Huang, Rahul Jayaraman, Andrew Jin, Patrick Lin, David Lin, Cindy Liu, Suzy Lou, Nitya Mani and Ashwath Thirumalai; juniors Lawrence Li, Anthony Luo, Jonathan Ma, Anika Mohindra, Emily Pan, Allison Wang, Alice Wu, Richard Yi and Michael Zhao; sophomores Kai-Siang Ang, Steven Cao, Misha Ivkov, Justin Jia, Winnie Li, Peter Wu and David Zhu; and freshmen Jerry Chen, Swapnil Garg, Jimmy Lin, Joanna Lin, Edgar Lin, Rajiv Movva, Shaya Zarkesh and Randy Zhao.