Saratoga’s top math placed ninth in Power Round at Berkeley Math Tournament (BMT) on Nov. 8, slightly worse than previous years since the increased number of participants made the competition more difficult.
This year, 19 SHS students attended the tournament, which was held on UC Berkeley’s campus. There were over 1,500 participants in total, competing for about five hours across three different rounds: Power, Individuals and Guts.
The school sent four teams in total, consisting of the following students:
- Saratoga 1: seniors Lawson Wang, Emily Wu and Max Rombakh, juniors Seabert Mao and Andy Lu and sophomore Matthew Lau
- Saratoga 2: seniors Nika Svizhenko and Vivian Lei, juniors Mona Chen and Derek Wang and freshman Joshua Yoo
- Saratoga 3: senior Navya Rao and freshman Aaron Lin, Julie Ye and Shyam Shroff
- Saratoga 4: sophomore Bryan Han and freshman Jeffrey Ding, Jonathan Li and Luca Perfetto.
The first round of the day was called Power, a 90-minute team-based proof-oriented round containing various sections tied together by an advanced math topic. This year’s overall theme hasn’t been disclosed yet, but previous years were focused on topics such as the math behind origami.
“My favorite round would be Power,” Ye said. “The content was quite unexpected but I found it really intriguing since it involved more comprehension skills and less pre-existing knowledge. However, it was difficult to communicate with my team effectively under so much pressure.”
After facing Power round’s daunting problems, students scrambled to the Individual round, which was either the General test, for less experienced students, or the Focus round on two specific subjects of their choice, for those with more experience.
The last round of the day was the Guts round, a 75-minute team-based round consisting of nine sets of problems increasing in difficulty. Teams were not allowed to move back to a set once they submitted it, making time allotment between sets important. Additionally, to add more pressure and competition, a live scoreboard displays the scores of every team.
“I had fun [during the Guts round] and the scoreboard was unexpected, but everyone was locked in even though we made some mistakes and turned things in too early,” Yoo said.
First time participants like Ye felt the full day experience at BMT was different yet enjoyable compared to other shorter math competitions.
“It was overall a wonderful experience, especially exploring the campus after the Power round,” Ye said. “I enjoyed seeing university students just strolling around. As a bonus, after the guts round, I attended an activity where we built origami and its tie to [math].”
At BMT and other math contests, the questions tested are very different from those in school. While the school math curriculum focuses on a couple concepts at a time, competition math involves a deeper understanding, pattern recognition and more critical thinking.
“I 100% will want to continue to participate in similar math tournaments. The experience was great, especially seeing so many academically successful students around and knowing that these contain some of the top students in Silicon Valley,” Ye said.
