Upper school Math Club members helped out at Harker’s annual Harker Math Invitational for middle and lower school students at the Blackford campus last Sunday.

The contest invited over 300 students from 25 schools, one of which is based out of state, to compete against each other in both individual and team rounds. While the majority of the participants of the tournament were middle school students, three elementary schools also sent representatives to the event.

Around 25 Harker volunteers chaperoned and organized the tournament. The contest problems, which covered a variety of topics including geometry, probability, number theory and algebra, were written by Math Club members Misha Ivkov (12), David Zhu (12), Michael Kwan (11), Jimmy Lin (11), Joanna Lin (11), Rajiv Movva (11), Shaya Zarkesh (11), Katherine “Kat” Tian (10), Michael Wang (10), Cynthia Chen (9), Rohan Cherukuri (9), Grace Huang (9) and Richard Yi (‘16). These students also met with Middle School Mathematics Department Chair Vandana Kadam to finalize competition details prior to the tournament.

“A lot of us wrote problems on our own very early- say, during fall of last year- before the competition,” Kat said. “We met up during the December break and during the February break to work together on the contest and do things like proofread problems, pick the problems we actually liked, write solutions and et cetera.”

The individual portion of the competition provided participants with a problem set of 30 questions. Because the contest problems are ordered based on difficulty level, sixth graders solved problems one through 20, seventh graders one through 25 and eighth graders six through 30. Students could also work on five bonus problems before the conclusion of the 45-minute individual testing period.

Competitors then worked in teams of up to seven members to participate in the team portion of the Invitational, which asked students to collaboratively solve a series of 15 problems in 45 minutes.

Amol Rama from Kennedy Middle School, Ralphie Cao from Aborn Institute and Spencer Rhodes from the Coral Academy of Science placed first in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade divisions of the individual competition of the Invitational. Harker seventh graders William Zhao and Kevin Wang also finished second and fourth, respectively, in the seventh grade division, while Harker eighth graders Aditya Singhvi, Sidra Xu, George Wehner and Eric Zhu finished second, third, fourth and fifth in the eighth grade division.

In the team competition, the Harker team of sixth graders Brian Chen, Gordon Chen, Riya Gupta, Connie Jiang, Ashley Hu, Stephen Xia and Sally Zhu took first in the sixth grade division and the Harker team of seventh graders David Dai, Alice Feng, Mark Hu, Angela Jia, Rohan Thakur, Clarice Wang and Kevin Wang took first in the seventh grade division.

The Harker team of eighth graders Luisa Pan, Aditya Singhvi, Betsy Tian, Sidra Xu, Bowen Yin, Eric Zhu and William Zhao took first in the eighth grade division, while the Harker eighth grade team of Emma Dione, Arya Maheshwari, Akshay Manglik, Srinath Somasundaram, Andrew Sun, Maria Vazhaeparambil and George Wehner took third in the eighth grade division.

“In terms of how Harker performed at the contest, I thought we did very well- the fact that the Harker teams from all three grades won first in their divisions was pretty impressive,” tournament volunteer Cynthia said. “Individually, people also performed well.”

Teams comprised of students who qualified for the state competition of MATHCOUNTS, a middle school math tournament, were ineligible to win awards at the Harker Math Invitational but were allowed to participate non-competitively.

Following the Harker Math Invitational, the next event for many Math Club members was the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), which was administered at school before lunch in the Nichols Atrium on Tuesday.