GARDEN GROVE : Student Is a Study in Love of Learning

Huynh-Hoa Bui can’t wait until summer vacation when she’ll finally have more time to do what she enjoys most--study.

With her current high school classes, including physics and advanced placement calculus, out of the way, the 18-year-old senior at Santiago High School plans to spend her summer delving into some of her favorite topics, such as music, chemistry, biology and number theory.

Earlier this month, Bui won top honors in a statewide mathematics talent search sponsored by Pomona College, which she had entered for fun.

Bui, who lives in Garden Grove, was one of three students named “outstanding” mathematicians in the Wisconsin-Pomona Mathematics Talent Search. She beat more than 200 other high school students in solving a series of questions requiring contestants to create complex geometry proofs and solve word problems.

“It’s like a mystery. I just wanted to solve it,” she said during a break between classes Monday.

Her math teacher, John Greek, said the contest did not test textbook knowledge so much as it tested mathematical reasoning and creativity in finding solutions. The problems were challenging not only for college-bound math students but also for professors.

“She’s incredible. She’s like a special find, a diamond,” he said.

“The fact is that she loves to learn,” Greek said. “She would do it without school. She told me she’d like to stay in school forever. She’d like to take every subject there is.”

Bui, who has a 3.99-grade-point average, missed getting a 4.0 because she got a B in a ninth-grade literature class. When she came to the United States from Vietnam in 1990, she understood little English and was placed in a basic English class. Now she is getting A’s in Advanced Placement English.

Bui, who will attend USC in the fall as a biology major, said she is invigorated by the challenge of learning new ideas and concepts. “When you know everything, you feel you have power,” she said.