Math team closes season with loss

Cindy Liu, Staff Writer

The Brahma’s Math Madness season came to an end with a narrow loss to Irvington High School of Fremont, California last month.

During Math Madness, high school math teams gather to compete in a 30-minute test comprising of seven to eight questions.

The top five members of each participating team with the most number of correct answers are recorded; the winner of the round is the team with the highest cumulative score. In the event of a tie, the team that spent less time answering the questions is the winner.

The Diamond Bar High School Math Team was placed in Division I this year, the most competitive division, after placing first in Division IIE last year. In the Brahma’s last round against Irvington High School, the DBHS Mathletes were defeated by one point. DBHS entered the competition ranked 20 in the nation, and Irvington entered ranking 14.

Senior Benjamin Chen, president of the Math Club, breezed through Math Madness, achieving a perfect score every round. He is the only DBHS member who managed to do so, with his performance being ranked 17 out of 21,377 students nationwide.

“Math Madness is something I do for fun,” Chen said. “It’s not really serious for me. I know a lot of people there take it really seriously and pride themselves on getting perfect scores, as they should. But as for me, I’ve been doing math competitions since I was in fourth grade, so Math Madness is easy.”

Chen said his longtime experience in math competitions is one of the reasons why he did so well.

He, along with other members of the Math Team, also participated in the recent Caltech Harvey Mudd Math Competition, where Chen placed seventh in the individual competition. The Brahmas, as a team, did not place within the top ten.

Other top performers for the Math Madness season include juniors Qinhong Chen, Matthew Ho, Felix Su, William Shao, Justin Feng, Jasmine Yang, David Lai, Fangcheng Wang, seniors Peyrin Kao, William He, Wavin Hong, Silas Wong, sophomores Christine Zhou, Michael Wu and freshman Howard Meng.