This year, Math team placed second in the State competition. It was held from Ma1 1st to May 2nd at the University of Illinois at its Urbana-Champagne campus. The key mathematicians there were Justin Yim (12), who played as the oralist, Aiden Kang (11), Lucy Wu (11), Ally Spence (11), Isaiah Liu (11), and Steven Zhang (12). “Working with some of the best math students in the school was a real privilege [this year],” Mr. Steven Korney, one of the head coaches, said. He and every coach are very proud of their excellent students. “Seeing them succeed always gives all the coaches great joy, especially because they work so hard,” Korney explained. “There’s just a lot of pride associated with that.”

Math team members’ training begins at the start of the school year. Like a sport, Math team has a “regular” and “post” season. During the regular season, Korney trains the students along with Mrs. Cheryl Ballenger, Mrs. Jessica Chapman, Mrs. Brittany Redig, and Mr. Wilbert Stroeve by giving the students past exam questions.

The regular season (with the North Suburban Math League) consists of five events in different places across the league. This year, the meets went from October to March, and took place in Hinsdale, Naperville, here, Highland Park, and Evanston. During the competitions, like in WYSE, students took tests in order to compete. Unlike WYSE, the tests are not all straight forward; there is a variety of competitions, including relays and different types of competitions. Some events also prohibit the use of calculators.

Each meet is on a different subject, and each grade level has a different one. For example, the freshmen could have number theory, while the juniors had probability and so on. However, there is also an oralist who is given three math problems at the competition that he must solve and then give a presentation on how he did so. Justin was the oralist year, and he worked mostly with mr. Stroeve, the oralist coach.

During the post-season, Mrs. Ballenger takes over as the coach. Under her, the students learn to compete solo and in teams at the freshman-sophomore or junior-senior level. Lucy, Ally, Isaiah, and Steven competed as the senior-junior relay team, and their team won the State championship. Justin and Kang took first place in their two-person junior-senior team.

Notable underclassmen teams include the sophomore team (Aparajitha Adiraju, Kishore Iyer, Oliver Leung, Aakash Setty and Eunice Yoon) who took fourth, the Precalculus team who took second, and the freshman-sophomore team of Aakash Setty (10) and Anmol Parande (9) who placed third. The eight-person freshman-sophomore team and Calculator teams each took fifth place. The freshman-sophomore relay team of Zach Qian (9), Nikhil Mangtani (9), Kishore Iyer (10), and Aparajitha Adiraju (10) took fifth as well.

In the individual sections, Justin took first in precalculus, Isaiah took third in precalculus, Parande who placed fourth in the Algebra 1 event, and Steven placed sixth in the precalculus event.

Congratulations to the fantastic math team!