A team of CRLS students competed at the
Harvard-MIT Math Tournament this year on November 12, 2016. The tournament, organized by Harvard and MIT students, attracted 147 teams with over 800 high school students participating, from places as far away as Beijing. The CRLS Math Club sent a team of six students (Benjamin Hollander-Bodie, Anna Rasmussen, Elizabeth Lucas-Foley, Haman Bagherianlemraski, Shuvom Sadhuka, and Daniel Shin) to compete at solving some very tough questions.
A medium-difficulty question:
The numbers 1, 2 , …, 11 are arranged in a line from left to right in a random order. It is observed that the middle number is larger than exactly one number to its left. Find the probability that it is larger than exactly one number to its right.
Our team placed a respectable 50th out of 147, but most importantly they really enjoyed the experience.
“HMMT is a great competition for students who want more from math. The problems are very well-designed and require creative problem solving, usually not more advanced than precalculus or so. In terms of what I like about HMMT, I personally like the guts round because it required solid teamwork as well as clever problem solving. Not all the problems even use traditional problem solving; I remember the last set of questions had one which asked us to estimate the sum of the ages of everyone in the room.
HMMT didn't surprise me all too much, mostly because I'd done it before, but the theme rounds are always fun since they change year to year and most problems build off one another.
I highly recommend HMMT, and more generally math competitions, to any student who has a passion for math and a desire to dig deeper and discover more nuanced and complicated parts of math that are usually not taught in high school. While school math is great, a lot of times the process of self-discovery is lost, which I think is the most important part of mathematics.”
- Shuvom Sadhuka, 11th grader in Math Club
Pictured from L to R: Benjamin Hollander-Bodie, Anna Rasmussen, Elizabeth Lucas-Foley, Haman Bagherianlemraski, Shuvom Sadhuka, Daniel Shin.