NC Math Team Takes Third Place
Nationally at 2008 arml

A team of fifteen students from around North Carolina placed third in the nation at the Thirty-third Annual American Regions Mathematics League (ARML) Meet on Saturday.  Two North Carolina teams participated at the University of Georgia site.  This year's contest was held simultaneously at Penn State University, Iowa State University, the University of Las Vegas, and the University of Georgia.  Scores from each of the sites were compiled and the A-Team from North Carolina placed first at the Georgia Site and third in the nation.  Only the perennially strong teams from New York City and Phillips Exeter Academy scored higher than the North Carolina Team.  San Francisco and Southern California rounded out the top five.  The North Carolina team, in what the coaches called a "rebuilding" year with an "awfully young" group of students, were somewhat surprised by their outstanding performance.  The North Carolina team had won this contest in 2006 and placed fourth in 2007.  This outstanding finish made the North Carolina team the only team to have finished in the top five in each of the past three years.    One-hundred thirty-five teams from the United States along with a team from Hong Kong and Vietnam competed in this year's contest. 

Two teams of fifteen students represented North Carolina at this meet.  Half of the team members were selected on the basis of their finish in the State Math Contest, held at the NC School of Science and Mathematics on April 24^th.  The other team members were selected on the basis of other competitions, most notably the Mathcounts, the AMC,  and AIME competitions.  After two practice sessions at the NC School of Science and Mathematics, the coaches divided the students into the A and B teams.  The B-Team normally consists of younger students who attend for the experience and training for future "A" teams.  The coaches for the NC teams were Archie Benton of North Buncombe High, Ken Thwing of Freedom High, Kathy Hill of Athens Drive, and David Mermin, a former NC-ARML team member and now a teacher at Cummings High School.

The North Carolina A-Team consisted of John Berman of Hoggard High School in Wilmington, Jeremy Hahn of Michaux Academy in Chapel Hill, Vivek Bhattacharya from Enloe High in Raleigh, Bryce Taylor from Mt. Tabor High School in Winston-Salem, William Schlieper from Green Hope High School in Cary, Pom McCabe from Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines, Fei Fei Wang of Chapel Hill High School, Joe Keefer of the NC School of Science and Mathematics and the Highland School of Technology in Gastonia, Christine Hong from the Arendell Parrott Academy in Kinston, Jane Bae of Chapel Hill High School, Daniel Vitek of Enloe High, Kevin Lang of Myers Park High School in Charlotte, Rang Wang of the NC School of Science and Mathematics and JH Rose High School of Greenville, Gray Symon from Chapel Hill High School, and Calvin Deng, a seventh-grader from Ligon Middle School and a member of the 2008 NC Mathcounts Team. 

The ARML Competition consists of three team rounds and one individual round.  The team rounds consist of a "Power Question" where students must derive and prove several related mathematics problems.  In this event, the team works together for one hour and normally produces a ten- to twenty-page solution for the problems.  The second team round consists of ten, unrelated, short-answer problems.  The intent of this round is for individual students or smaller groups of students to solve the problems and have other groups or students independently verify their solutions.  This round only lasts twenty minutes.  The final team round is the relays for which the fifteen-member team is divided into five three-student teams and each subset must work a problem in relay-fashion.  The first student will work a problem and the answer for this problem must be used in the second problem; likewise for the final segment of the relay.  Faster solutions (within 3 minutes) get more points than those submitted within six minutes.  

The final round is the individual round, in which each student works four pairs of problems, given ten minutes per problem.  The top individuals vie for individual honors and prize money from the DE Shaw & Company, a global investment and technology development company. 

The North Carolina Teams are sponsored by the State Mathematics Contest Committee of the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics with additional support from the Duke Energy Foundation.