Several students gathered in an MSMS classroom on September 25 to participate in a practice round for Math Madness. The Mu Alpha Theta club hosted this event with Kishan Patel, MSMS math instructor and club sponsor.

Math Madness is a competition between two schools that takes place on a website where students individually work on eight problems for 30 minutes. The five highest scores are added together from each school and that total score determines who is the winner. The questions are set up similarly to the questions given by the American Mathematics Competition, or the AMC, which consists of challenging problems that force students to use creativity and prior knowledge to find a solution.

Any student at MSMS can participate in Math Madness and not be a part of Mu Alpha Theta, and the club encourages other students to join them in some challenging mathematical problems.

A junior member, Helen Peng, stated, “I haven’t really touched challenging math problems for a while, so I was kind of a stepping outside the box , but at the same time it was a pretty exciting, especially because I would not consider myself someone who loves math, but surprisingly I enjoyed it!”

Peng goes on to say that for many people it is not about the competition, but it is a way for people to have fun and challenge themselves and get to participate in an event that helps them with their math skills.

Junior Hamilton Wan, a Mu Alpha Theta member, participated in this practice round event and discussed how the round went for him. “It went pretty well and the problems were fun.” Wan states, “It was much more intense and challenging than I expected it to be, which makes me excited for the upcoming events.”

“The questions are meant to stimulate creativity and originality in problem solving in approaching these problems. By using what you know and using that information creatively to find a solution to a problem that you might not commonly see is what Math Madness tries to enclose,” said senior Gary Nguyen, a two-year member of the club, explaining what the problems are meant to be for students.