Count Them In : ‘Mathletes’ Run the Numbers at UC Irvine Contest

Brow furrowed and hands clenched, 13-year-old Brendan Cochran-Bond stamped his feet in frustration after realizing that all the answers to the test his team had just taken were left on scratch paper and never transferred to the proper form.

“We all messed up,” he said of his four-person group. “We should have all been filling in the answers. We’re a team.”

The four students from Pasadena’s Polytechnic Middle School were competing in the 14th annual MathCounts competition Saturday at UC Irvine, sponsored by the California Society of Professional Engineers and the university.

The annual event, designed to promote math skills and teamwork in addition to rewarding top students, drew 164 seventh- and eighth-grade mathematicians from 62 Southern California schools, including 20 students from Orange County.

A similar competition was held concurrently for Northern California at UC Davis.

Palos Verdes Intermediate student Chi-En Chien, 13, took first place in the UCI competition and will travel to Washington for the national competition May 9, along with the three top scorers from UC Davis. The state’s four highest individual scorers go to the national event.

The top Orange County contender was Eddie Kay, 14, a student at Irvine’s Venado Middle School, who placed seventh.

Kay, who also competed in last year’s event, said social studies projects and tests cut into his MathCounts study time this year. “I think I could have done better,” he said. “But I’m satisfied.”

Teachers, engineers and other volunteers began coaching students as early as September for the competition, some of them devoting at least an hour a day to the cause.

Sue Parsons, a Long Beach aerospace engineer who has been involved with the program for 12 years, said math skills seldom earn acclaim. MathCounts aims to remedy that, she said, and to change the stereotype that being good at math is “geeky.”

“Everyone gets recognized for sports,” she said. “This is a way to look at math as a prestigious skill.” Those who excel, she said, are called “mathletes.”

Like professional athletes, Saturday’s competitors felt the heat of the race. After the first series of individual tests, 13-year-old Jeffrey Hoshiko and his teammates from Ethel Dwyer Middle School in Huntington Beach admitted that the problems were quite challenging.

“This competition is tough,” eighth grader Hoshiko said.

Split into groups of four, the students had to solve 10 problems in 20 minutes as teams.

Individual scores were calculated separately from group scores. The top 10 individuals then faced off, one-on-one, in a countdown round.

Prizes were awarded to the highest-scoring teams, individuals, and the winner of the countdown round.

One of Saturday’s countdown questions: “Twelve coins, consisting of dimes and nickels, are worth 95 cents. What is the number of the dimes?” (The answer: 7.)

Though the time limit was 45 seconds, contestants often called out answers before the moderator even finished reading the question.

Math teacher John Melstrom, who coached the team from Fulton Middle School in Fountain Valley, said his young mathematicians often find solutions to problems that have him stumped.

“They have an ability to see relationships and patterns quickly, and to apply them to solving problems,” he said.