Volume 1, Issue 7
April  19, 2007

Welcome to The Avid Learner, an online newsletter of Avid Academy for Gifted Youth.

Table of Contents

1. Avid Academy Expands Summer Math and Science Programs
2. 2007 USAMO Qualifiers Announced
3. 2007 Southern California MATHCOUNTS Chapter Contest Held at UCI
4. Five Avid Students Took Top Honors at California Math League Contests
5. Ivy League Schools Reject Record Number of Applicants
6. The International Baccalaureate Curriculum
7. No Calculators on AMC 8/10/12 Next Year
8. Math Curriculum for Gifted Students
9. Mathematics and the Internet

1. Avid Academy Expands Summer Math and Science Programs

Avid Academy has expanded its Math and Science Olympiad Programs for Summer 2007.  Please click on a specific program to get more information:

• 2007 Orange County Math Olympiad Summer Camp for Grades 4 - 6
• 2007 Orange County Math Olympiad Summer Camp for Grades 7 - 8
• 2007 Orange County Math Olympiad Summer Camp for Grades 9 - 11
• 2007 Summer Academic Jump Start Program for Grades 6 - 11
• 2007 Orange County Science Olympiad Summer Camp for Grades 6 - 7

Space is limited to 25 students per session on a first-come, first-serve basis.  Registration deadline is Friday, June 1, 2007.  Current Avid Students in good academic standing will receive guaranteed admission if register by May 15, 2007.  Need-based financial aids are available.

2. 2007 USAMO Qualifiers Announced

The Mathematical Association of America announced 2007 USAMO Qualifiers.  Out of 502 national qualifiers, 18 students from Southern California made the list:

• Zhou Yang, 11, Arcadia High School, Arcadia
• Jeffrey Wu, 11, The Bishop's School, La Jolla
• Yuxi Tian, 10, Irvine High School, Irvine
• Jeffrey Manning, 11, Home School, Pasadena
• Tedrick Leung, 12, North Hollywood High School, North Hollywood
• Jacob Levine, 12, North Hollywood High School, North Hollywood
• Zarathustra Brady, 12, Magnolia Science Academy, Reseda
• David Gee, 12, Mira Costa High School, Manhattan Beach
• Alex Nisnevich, 10, Oak Park High School, Oak Park
• Shotaro Makisumi, 11, Polytechnic School, Pasadena
• Joshua Wang, 10, Scripps Ranch High School, San Diego
• Henry Tung, 12, Torrey Pines High School, Encinitas
• Eric Chang, 12, Troy High School, Fullerton
• Jay Whang, 9, Troy High School, Fullerton
• Djordjo Milovic, 12, University High School, Irvine
• Zhifan Zhang, 10, University High School, Irvine
• Ik-kyeom Kim, 11, Valencia High School, Valencia
• Vincent Le, 10, Westview High School, San Diego

The score cards for the counties are:

• Los Angeles County - 9
• Orange County - 5
• San Diego County 4

Congratulations to all the qualifiers who will take the USAMO exam on April 24 & 25.  The 9-hour, 6-question USAMO exam will determine the top 24 students who will compete for the United States International Math Olympiad (IMO) team.

3. 2007 Southern California MATHCOUNTS Chapter Contest Held at UCI

The 2007 California MATHCOUNTS Chapter Competition was held at UCI and UC-Davis on March 17, 2007 for Southern and Northern California respectively.  In the Southern California Section, 34 teams and 160 students from San Diego to San Louis Obispo participated in the competition.  Ridgecrest Intermediate School, South Pasadena Middle School, and Palos Verdes Intermediate School finished in the top three.  Daichi Tsuna, a six grader from Ridgecrest Intermediate School, is the winner of the individual round and will represent California at the 2007 National MATHCOUNTS.  Also on the California team are three students from Northern California: Nathan Pinsker of David Starr Jordan Middle School, and Patrick Yang and Albert Wu of The Harker School.

For a complete of winners and Orange County results, visit 2007 Southern California MATHCOUNTS results.

California Math League Contest results for Grades 6-8 are now available.  Avid Academy students did well in the 8th grade contest by claiming five of the twenty-five perfect scores.  Students who received perfect scores are Monica Chen of Palos Verdes Intermediate School, Edward Dinh and Kevin Kung of Rancho San Joaquin Middle School, and Alex Pusey and Johnny Li of St. Margaret's Episcopal School.  Additionally, Dai Yang of Rancho San Joaquin Middle School placed 3rd in the 7th grade contest.

For complete results, please visit:

• 2007 California Math League 8th Grade Results
• 2007 California Math League 7th Grade Results
• 2007 California Math League 6th Grade Results

For Orange County winners, please visit: Avid Academy Math Contest Results

Most colleges have made their admission decisions for the class of 2011.  Elite  universities received record number of applications, making this year the most competitive year for college admission.  Here is a summary of admission rates from the top schools:

Click on each college name to view detailed admission news about the college.  Here are some articles from national media:

• Bloomberg: Princeton Rejects 90.5% of Applicants, most since '53
• Los Angeles Times: Why doesn't Harvard love me?
• New York Times: A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them
• ABC News: Harvard Rejection Rate Breaks Record

The International Baccalaureate program (The IB Program) has became more and more popular in the United States and has been offered by more than 600 high schools in U.S.  It provides an alternative to the AP program for gifted high school students, although many schools (e.g., Troy High School in Fullerton, Orange County) choose to offer both programs.

There have been concerns over IB program's curriculum over the years and some claimed that the IB Program is un-American.  The article outlined the value and belief differences between the IB and USA curriculums.  However, the issues seem to be related to a small number of courses and should not be used to undervalue the benefits of the IB program as a more challenging program for talented students.

Over the years, the use of calculators on math competitions has been one of the hot topics.  There has been significant concerns regarding the unfair advantages achieved using certain calculators.  Stories about brutal-forcing a problem using a calculator were told after almost every competition.  This year, one student even wrote a simple program on his programmable calculator to solve the problem #25 on AMC 10A.  While the student's programming skills should be complimented, applying it during a math competition leaves room for debate.

Starting from 2008, American Mathematics Association has decided to disallow calculators on AMC 8, AMC 10, and AMC 12 competitions.  AMC Director Steve Dunbar gave two reasons why calculators are not allowed in an online post:

1. Allowing calculators essentially trivialized some interesting and valuable mathematical questions that could be asked if calculators were not allowed. These questions often involved logarithms and trigonometric functions, as well as the graphs of functions.
2. Knowing that some students were using TI-89s and some were not forced the question writers to create problems with powers or values that would swamp the display of the calculator if a student attempted to use a calculator directly, say polynomials to the 2007th power, or problems that involve 2007! and so forth. It will now be possible to create good problems that involve the same principles but with powers or coefficients that are much more reasonable to use.

So, it is time to say goodbye to calculator and practice paper-and-pencil long divisions and multiplications.  For AMC 12 test takers, it will also be a good idea to study logarithms and trigonometry.  For example, calculating tan(7.5) can be an interesting problem solving problem but becomes trivial using calculators.

When Katherine Gavin taught algebra to seventh-graders with advanced math skills, she found it was almost too late to tap into their potential. Accustomed to math coming easily, they sometimes resented the work. The key, she decided, is to grab kids when they still believe "the fun part of math is the challenge ... and persisting [until] you get that 'aha!' moment."

Now she's witnessing those treasured discoveries among third- to fifth-graders as director of Project M3: Mentoring Mathematical Minds. Based at the University of Connecticut's Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, it's designed to nurture math talent in a diverse group of students. About half come from low-income families, and many are not native English speakers.

Here is the rest of the story from The Christian Science Monitor: Subtracting a 'gifted' gap in math education.

This month's cover story of the Forbes Magazine profiles Akamai Technologies, which provided super-fast digital delivery services to websites such as Apple's iTune.  Akamai is the Hawaiian word for "clever".  The following is an abstract from Video Prophet by Scott Woolley of Forbes Magazine on Akamai's young founder Daniel Lewin.

Daniel Lewin was a brilliant mathematician.  After arrived at MIT in 1996 to pursue graduate study, he came up with the idea of building a smarter Internet.  Working with his professor Frank Leighton, the head of the Algorithms Group at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the two hashed out a basic idea: "Connect computers to the far reaches of the Net, then program them to communicate with one another to spot better routes for getting e-mails, Web pages and other packets to where they needed to go."  The goal is to make web page download time as small as possible.  Backing up this goal are mathematical cleverness and programming talent.

Lewin and Leighton turned their idea into a business plan that tied for fourth place in a Business Plan contest at MIT's Sloan School of Management.  Their winning prize was $100.  In 1998, they received $4 million in venture funding and launched company.  Akamai offered shares to the public in October 1999.  On the first day of trading, the stock climbed 458%.  Since mathematics is the foundation of the company, a large portion of the Akamai technical staff were MIT students and faculty.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Lewin boarded the American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles.  He settled into seat 9B in business class.  One row ahead of him, on the other side of the aisle, sat Mohamed Atta.  Another hijacker seated directly behind him.  He heroically fought the hijackers and was stabbed.  Half an hour later, at 8:46 a.m., the plane slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  Daniel Lewin was 31.

For the complete story, please visit Forbes Magazine cover story: Video Prophet.