Walter Reed Students Add Up Victory in Math Competition : Education: ‘Mathletes’ from the North Hollywood school edge Placerita Junior High of Newhall. Both teams will go to state finals.

Crunch, crunch, crunch went the numbers. Ding, ding, ding went the bell.

Even before the first few words of a cryptic math equation could be read to him, King Moo, 13, had already slammed his hand down on a silver bell to signal that he knew the answer.

Beside him, his opponent and Walter Reed Junior High schoolmate, Grace Lee, 13, looked perplexed. King answered questions so fast that those matched against him hardly had time to blink, let alone think.

King handily won the Countdown Round of the 12th annual San Fernando Valley MathCounts competition, held Saturday at Cal State Northridge. In overall individual performance, Grace prevailed and King came in second.

Their team of four “mathletes” from North Hollywood placed first ahead of five other teams, edging out Placerita Junior High of Newhall by 2.25 points, out of a possible 66. Both teams will move on to the state finals, to be held March 10 at UC Irvine.

“It feels really good because we’ve been working pretty hard,” said Grace after collecting her trophies. “It was kind of, like, exhilarating.”

Grace said the team owed its success to coach Bill (Fitz) Fitz-Gibbon, who also led the team to a Valley chapter victory last year. Brandon Ashe, 12, who took third place as an individual, and Melvin Chu, 12, who came in fifth, rounded out the team.

One member of last year’s Walter Reed team, Michael Schulman, went on to place second as an individual in the national competition. This year’s national competition is scheduled for April in Washington, D. C. The person with the highest overall score will collect as much as $6,000 in scholarships.

The MathCounts program is sponsored by the Society of Professional Engineers, who have a vested interest in keeping kids focused on math excellence, said organizer Norman Baron, a civil engineer on the Metro Rail project.

The contest is composed of four events. In the Sprint Round, the mathletes must answer 30 questions in 40 minutes. The Target Round challenges students to answer eight questions, presented in pairs, in less than six minutes per pair. The Team Round allows all four team members to consult on a series of more difficult problems.

Finally, in the Countdown Round, the top individual scorers square off against one another, answering questions projected on a screen in the mathematical equivalent of an Old West shootout.

At a time when students are scoring abysmally on math tests--more than 60% of the fall freshman at CSUN have been judged unprepared to handle college-level math classes--these young students are proving themselves exceptions to the rule.

Although the average California Scholastic Aptitude Test math score slipped two points in 1994, Placerita’s Brian Roney, 13, has already hit the perfect 800 mark, said his coach, Garrett Kenehan.

Like King, Brian answered questions during the Countdown Round with lightning speed, as if he had a math co-processing chip in his head.

“You just see the question and you look at the numbers and ignore the words while you solve all the numbers,” he said, trying to explain how he arrives at his answers so quickly. “Then you read the words to find out what they want. Sometimes the answer is obvious.”

Of course, when it comes to math problems, rote memorization doesn’t hurt. Brian said his recent study of square roots helped him solve several questions rapidly.

Kristen Auslander, 13, of the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, said she enjoys math because there are always a concrete solutions to the problems.

“It’s not like English--it’s a clear, logical answer,” she said. “You don’t have to have an opinion or over-think it.”

Though all of the participants took the competition seriously, scrutinizing the exams with furrowed brows and jotting notes with quickly scratching pencils, during the intermittent breaks the 44 mathletes were chatty, anxious teen-agers as interested in apple juice, cookies and nearby video games as they were in trinomial equations.

Joy Bell, 12, of Holmes Middle School in Northridge battled her way through a phalanx of digital monstrosities in a game of Street Fighter II, as she and her teammates waited for the Countdown Round to start.

Other students gathered around tables, debating the answers to test questions.

“It was either 5,280 or 5,820,” said individual champ Grace, while her teammates nodded their heads in agreement. “I’m positive.”

“That’s the fun part--watching the discussion, seeing the excitement in their faces,” said engineer Jerry Kraim, who had been working out some of the test questions on his own. “These problems are for kids with some juice in their heads.”

Also participating in the MathCounts tournament were La Mesa Junior High of Canyon Country and John Muir Middle School from Burbank.

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Math Competition Questions

Teams of seventh- and eighth-grade math whizzes from the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys worked through a dizzying array of problems as part of a regional mathematics competition. To help students prepare for the contest, sample questions were prepared:

1) A circular table is pushed onto the corner of a square room so that a point P on the edge of the table is 8” from one wall and 9” from the other wall as shown. Find the radius of the table in inches.

2) The smallest square shown is inscribed in square ABCD, which is inscribed in square EFGH, which is inscribed in the largest square MNOP. If the area of the smallest square has the minimum possible value, what is the ratio of the area of the smallest square to the area of the largest square? Express your answer as a common fraction.

3) A number is called increasing if each of its digits is greater than the digit immediately to its left, if there is one. How many increasing numbers are there between 100 and 200?