Female mathletes compete in annual Math Prize contest

The rhythm of competitive math has become long familiar to experienced members of the math club, and one common theme runs along each contest—they are almost all male-dominated.

Last month, however, three female representatives from the school competed in the annual Math Prize for Girls contest, a national competition held on the East Coast.

Sophomore Priyanka Krishnamurthy, junior Amanda Chow and senior Math Club president Alissa Zhang flew to Boston, on Sept. 15 to participate. The competition began in 2009. Two hundred seventy-seven girls nationwide competed, almost 100 more than last year, and the geographical breadth of participants has increased as well.

“I think there were people from every single state, which can be a bit unusual,” Chow said. “There were also a lot of girls from Canada, and I’m pretty sure there was at least one from China too.”

The contest itself was held on Sept. 17. Zhang said the difficulty of the 20-question competition was comparable to the American Invitational Mathematics Exam, a contest that only the top 1 percent of nation-wide scores on a preliminary exam qualify to take.

Neither Zhang nor Krishnamurthy placed individually. Because Zhang won seventh place overall last year, she felt that her performance this year was not up to par.

“I was kind of disappointed, to be honest,” Zhang said. “I wasn’t really expecting to win anything, but I guess I was hoping I would, especially after last year.”

Although the competition was individually scored and only Chow won an honorable mention, club adviser PJ Yim said it was impressive that four girls from SHS qualified for the competition at all (one chose not to attend). According to Chow, many of the girls she met were the only female members of their schools’ math clubs.

“We have a pretty girl-friendly environment here,” Yim said. “Before, when the math club first started, there were virtually no girls in the core members, but now we’ve definitely improved on that front.”

Zhang and Chow both claimed that, whether by design or not, the environment at Math Prize for Girls was much more relaxed than most math competitions they had attended.

“The all-girls quality definitely influenced the environment there because normally there’d be a lot more guys,” Zhang said. “Usually girls feel pretty isolated in math, so this was an opportunity where we could all get to know one another.”

Chow, too, felt that the atmosphere at the competition was significantly more laid-back than others she had attended, despite the unchanged difficulty level of the exam.

“When they told us we could start the test, I didn’t hear the usual frantic papers flying everywhere that I would hear at every other math competition,” Chow said. “I noticed that it was a lot less competitive, and I really liked that about Math Prize.”

And outside of competition spirit alone? Despite the benefits, there was one unfortunate downfall to an all-girls contest, according to Chow:

“For the first time ever, the line for the girls’ bathroom was longer than the line for the guys’. Their line was pretty much nonexistent.”