Could you find the greatest prime factor of any three-digit number? Could you do it without a calculator? Could you do it within 45 seconds?
Questions and requirements like these made up some of the easier problems that competitors faced in the MATHCOUNTS 2010 National Competition in Orlando, Fla.
The team consisted of Kevin Liu, Kevin Yang, Kolya Malkin, and Darryl Wu. Liu and Yang, in eighth grade and seventh grade respectively, are students at Bellevue’s Odle Middle School.
Malkin is an eighth grader at Redmond Middle School. Wu is an eighth grader at Seattle’s Lakeside School.
Wu individually placed in the semi-finals (the two semi-finalists who did not advance to become champion or runner-up are not ranked) of the competition.
To be a member of the team that would represent the state of Washington at the national competition, each competitor had to go through multiple levels of testing, starting at a school-level MATHCOUNTS competition, then a chapter competition and then a state competition. The top four students at the state competition were then selected to be members of the state team that would attend the MATHCOUNTS National Competition.
The group met every Sunday for two-hour-long practice sessions starting immediately after the state-level MATHCOUNTS competition. In a conference room in the Microsoft campus, the students would decipher problems on a white board.
Malkin’s described his reasons for joining MATHCOUNTS as “one because it’s math, one because it’s competition.”
The former resonates deeply with the other members of the team, all of whom take advanced math courses usually taken by students years older than them. The competitors also frequent math forums. In fact, the students often refer to each other by the usernames they use on the math forums.
Liu, Yang, and Malkin cited as their first competition the Seattle Region Math is Cool competition. They were in third grade. The competition was geared towards sixth graders. Wu could not remember the first competition he had participated in. As the 2008 MATHCOUNTS National Champion, Wu was the youngest individual winner ever of the MATHCOUNTS National competition.
It was not uncommon for the students to spend several hours each day devoted exclusively to math. By the time the competition rolled around, the team members were familiar with all the questions. All that happened, as Kevin Liu stated, was that “they changed the numbers.”
In fact, the team members insisted that they could have taken first place in the competition had it not been for simply running out of time while writing down the answer.
The competition this year was especially fierce. Some of the highest scores ever were seen: seven competitors managed to achieve a near-perfect 45 out of 46 points.
Min Liu, the father of Kevin Liu and coach of the team, supplemented Kevin’s training with math problems at 5 a.m. in the morning to simulate the three-hour difference in time zones between Seattle and Orlando. As for the competitors, after a grueling year of competition, their plans for the coming months and years remains the same: more math.
Changlin Li is a student at Interlake High School and an intern with the Bellevue Reporter. He can be reached at 425-453-4270, ext. 5060.
