The theater was crazy and full of energy. As teams rushed to turn in their final answers in the hopes of getting a high score on the “estimathon,” the last set of the Guts round, dozens of mathematicians talked over each other.
Team 1 from Saratoga turned in their final papers with a worried nervousness as they watched their spot in the top 5 stay fixed on the scoreboard.
The answers for the last round had already been turned in, so they would have to wait until the awards event to see how they did.
This is what it looked like on November 2 when three teams from the SHS Math Club went to the Berkeley Math Tournament (BMT).
The BMT is a tournament for about 1,100 students in grades 9 through 12 from area high schools, middle schools, and math groups.
Team 1, which was made up of seniors Alan Lu and Skyler Mao, junior Lawson Wang, and sophomores Andy Lu, Seabert Mao, and Vivian Zhong, came in third overall and first among the high schools that went.
Juniors Richard Fan, Ella Li, Max Rombakh, and Emily Wu were on Team 2, along with newbies Fiona Liu and Derek Wang. Alan Cai, a senior, Vivian Lei, a junior, Navya Rao, a sophomore, Mona Chen, and a student, Jen Li made up Team 3.
Notably, Team 1 came in fourth place in the Power round. They were a proof-based team that worked with this year’s folding theme.
They also came in sixth place in Guts, a rapid-fire round where teams get three questions at a time and have to turn in all of their answers before they can get the next set of questions. There were over 100 teams that competed.
The people on the team are all very good at what they do; in solo competitions, all of them got awards (top 20%). Skyler Mao got third place in Calculus.
Skyler’s younger brother Seabert Mao and senior Alan Lu got sixth and tenth place in Geometry, respectively. Andy Lu got seventh place in both Calculus and Algebra.
Along with the official competitions, BMT also held some fun events like the Integration Bee and the Plank Countdown, where people would fight by counting down while doing a plank.
Alan Lu came in fourth place at the Integration Bee. Seabert Mao took part in the Plank Countdown and was quickly kicked off.
Most people in the club also took part in the American Math Competition (AMC), which was held at school on November 6 and 12. The best students will be able to take the American Math Invitational Exam (AIME) in February.
The school team with the most points is really good, especially since we only had three sophomores,” Alan Lu said. “Some people could have done better, but as a whole, we were pretty consistent, so our team still did great.
