On March 5, nearly 330 middle school students from 15 schools attended the 18th annual Diana Nichols Math Invitational. In addition to the 14 South Bay schools participating in the event (including Harker), Las Vegas’ Coral Academy of Science made the trip from out of state for the third consecutive year.

The high level of competition was evident throughout the event. A four-way tie in the grade 6 team event led to a tiebreaker that resulted in Harker’s team (Audrey Cheng, Juliana Li, Angela Liu, Katerina Matta, Kashish Priyam, Aarush Vailaya and Jonathan Xue) taking first place. Harker’s grade 8 team (Arjun Barrett, Brian Chen, Amruta Dharmapurikar, Alex Lan, Krish Maniar, Stephen Xia and Annli Zhu) also took first place, while the grade 7 team (Emma Gao, Angelina Hu, Ansh Sheth, Julie Shi, Michelle Wei, Aniketh Tummala and William Zhang) placed second.

Harker students also were successful in the individual event, with Stephen Xia, Arjun Barrett and Alex Lan taking first, third and fourth, respectively, at the grade 8 level. At the grade 7 level, Heidi Lu placed third, Aniketh Tummala took fourth and William Zhang finished fifth. Angela Liu placed second in the grade category.

The object of this year’s estimation contest was a “HMI 2019” sign made of plastic googly eyes. Contestants guessed at the number of googly eyes in the sign, with Megan Brezlin of Sunnyvale’s Peterson Middle School winning the contest with her estimate of 2,596, remarkably close to the actual number of 2,603.