PRISMS Falcons win the 7th place in PUMaC 2014

PRISMS Falcons, the math team of our school, participated in Princeton University Mathematics Competition on Nov 22nd, 2014. This was the second time for us to join in this big party (last year, we participated in division B and won the 2nd place). Among more than 70 teams and 600 students, PRISMS Falcons won 7th place in division A, better than many famous math and science schools (for example, Stuyvesant High School).

Here is the list of the awards we won:

• PRISMS Falcons won 7th place in overall team ranking
• PRISMS Falcons won 7th place in Power Round
• PRISMS Falcons won 7th place in Team Round
• Peter Peng won 5th place in overall individual ranking! And he won 6th place in Number Theory and 8th in Geometry.
• Joe Zhou won 5th place in Geometry. He was also qualified to the individual final competition.

Our team members are: Peter (Junyao) Peng, Joe (Ziqi) Zhou, Max (Zhaohui) Xiong, Richard (Lingyun) Xiao, Andy (Yiming) Zhang, William (Jifan) Zhang, Mark (Tingwei) Liu, Frank (Kunpeng) Huang, Chao (Zhao) Liu, and Gavin (Xuzhang) Li.

Congratulations!

Now our math team is more confident, and everyone is more enthusiastic to attend senior math team (every Tuesday) or junior math team (every Wednesday). We are looking forward to the next competitions.

What is PUMaC?

PUMaC (Princeton University Mathematics Competition) is an international competition organized by Princeton University math department, one of the best math departments in US.

This is the 9th year of PUMaC. It has become one of the most famous and interesting math competitions and attracts some of the most brilliant mathematics students from around the world. On Nov 22nd, more than 70 teams and 600 students came to join this competition.

In the competition, each team needed to attend the following three different rounds:

1. Power Round: Students needed to work on a mathematical project together. It looks more like a math research: learn the background knowledge, and then try to solve a series of challenging questions. It requires students have strong abilities of self-learning, math understanding, creative thinking and clear expressing
2. Individual Round: Each student selected two topics from Algebra, Geometry, Number Theory and Combinatorics. Then they worked on the questions individually
3. Team Round: In very short time, students needed to solve many questions. So it requires very good teamwork: distribute the problems quickly and rationally, share ideas in time, help each other.