Harker students Richard Yi, grade 9, and Rahul Sridhar, grade 11, placed eighth and ninth, respectively, out of 276 participants at the CalTech Harvey Mudd Math Competition, held in mid-November at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. Additionally, Sridhar and Ashwath Thirumalai, grade 10, took third in the team competition, while Yi and sophomore David Lin’s team took fifth out of a total of 47 teams.

Harker was also among the top-performing schools in the California Mathematics League in November and December. The upper school tied for first place with 60 points and scored 54 points with the middle school students’ scores included. A total of 13 students earned a perfect score: Shaya Zarkesh, grade 7; David Zhu, grade 8; Michael Zhao, grade 9; Patrick Lin, Cindy Liu, Suzy Lou, Nitya Mani and Sachin Peddada, all grade 10; Varun Mohan, Alex Pei, Rahul Sridhar and Vikram Sundar, all grade 11; and Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12.

At the Mexican Mathematical Olympiad in November, Varun Mohan, grade 11, was one of four members the United States team that was one of 200 teams at the event. Mohan won silver, just a few points shy of the gold medal award.

In the Mandelbrot Competition, which takes place in five rounds occurring over the course of the school year, Harker currently sits at fourth place among the 55 schools in the Redwood Region, and seventh place nationally. Sophomores Patrick Lin, Cindy Liu and Andrew Zhang are among the top individual contests in the Redwood Region, tied with the other top scorers at 14 points. At the national level, Varun Mohan, grade 11, has 12 points and David Lin has 11.

At the fourth annual Math Prize for Girls Contest in September, held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cindy Liu, Nitya Mani and Suzy Lou, all grade 10, received Honorable Mentions for their performance. As they were among the top 44 students in the contest, all three students were later invited to compete in the 2012 Math Prize for Girls Olympiad.