Magnolia Science Academy Students Advance to MathCounts State Competition and American Invitational Mathematics Examination
By Martha Sessums
Spelling bees get all the cultural glamour, but math competitions are their modern bee counterpart. And I think they must be way harder than spelling the word pulchritude.*
Congratulations to the students at ACE Partner School Magnolia Science Academy (MSA) in Santa Clara for their first time in advancing to the Mathcounts California State Competition to be held March 22. The team earned a perfect score on the team round, two team members finished in the top 10 among more than 400 contestants and the team was ranked 6th place among more than 50 schools. Now those are cool numbers!
Team members are: Amogh Gaitonde, Nikhil Mandava (8th place winner), Vinay Krishna and Stan Zhang (9th place winner.)
Individual contestants are: Cindy Zhang, Eric Zhang, Kyle Chui, Ophelia Chui, Sashwath Sundher and Yousef Azhar.
Some of the math team Ramanujans demonstrate a straight line.
“We wish our students good luck at the state competition and thank our teachers, parents and volunteers for their support,” said Yilmaz Ak, principal at MSA. “And special thanks to our volunteer coach Dr. Gürel.”
But there’s more. Three MSA students qualified for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME.) Students who perform well on AIME are invited to the USA Mathematical Olympiad, which will be held late April.
Seventh-grade Stan Zhang was MSA’s top winner with a score of 132, making it to the top 1% in this high school math competition. This earned him an Honor Roll Distinction. Eight-grade Vinay Krishna won second place while scoring 124.5 and earned a Certificate of Distinction. Eight-grade Nikhil Mandava came in third, scoring 114 and earned a Young Student Certificate of Achievement. Stan, Vinay and Nikhil will participate in AIME later this month.
In addition to these top three, MSA had five more middle school students earning the Young Student Certificate of Achievement. They are: Kyle Chui, Amogh Gaitonde, Sriniva Gandikota, Daniil Klyunikov and Cindy Zhang.
“The students will study very hard for the state competition,” said Hakan Taymaz, MSA College Counselor. “They will stay after school everyday for two hours, and three hours on Wednesdays. Moreover, they will study two to three hours everyday after they go home, and come to school every Saturday for day camp. In total, they will study about 40-50 hours for the state competition, in addition to their daily school assignments.”
If you want to keep up with these math geniuses, the school has created a blog for the Ramanujan Club, as they call themselves. They will blog about how they feel before and after the competition. Well, if they have time.
Congratulations to these amazing MSA students who make it all add up with pulchritude.
*Pulchritude: beauty, a spelling bee word made famous in the movie “Akeelah and the Bee.”