Math Field Day @ UM – Flint

February 26, 2008

It was a good day to skip the school – snow storm with but no snow day. I woke up at 6 am to be ready by 7. Then, we were heading off to the University of Michigan – Flint to join the 41st Math Field Day in the name of Cranbrook Kingswood School.

Basically it is the series of math competitions and games. Each team has five members, one has to be a freshman or a sophomore. There are two parts of competitions – an individual part and a team part. For the individual, there are Mad Hatter A, Mad Hatter B, Leapfrog, and Chalk Talk. For the team part, there are Team Essay, Huddle, Swiss Game, and Relays.

This is our team.

From left to right,

• Well, I – team up with Max, I was the representative on the Leapfrog.
• JP – he was for the Chalk Talk
• Mr. Mathieu – Math Club adviser, and a driver
• Kevin Wu – a genius, sophomore, he has to go on Mad Hatter B
• Yong – math club co-president (with JP actually). He was there for Mad Hatter A
• Max He – the most attractive Chinese in CK, seriously seriously seriously. Leapfrog.

After finished our individual parts, we teamed up and went on our battle. First, we started on the team essay. UM gave us a classroom (with a chalkboard – yeah!) and gave us a pile of questions. This year it was about the Fibonacci Sequence. We had to learn something new (not actually hehe) then prove something. We finished all of them in the last minute.

Then we went on the Huddle. It was four easy question. We had to finish them in four minutes. The next one was real fun – the Swiss Game. Two teams are compete each other. Members sit in a row partitioned by another team members. The proctor then gave sixteen values of x, then, gave first four values of f(x). We had to find f(x) of the rest twelve numbers. The proctor would ask us to answer person by person – team by team.

There were four rounds. The functions were ridiculous at all. You can take a look. By the way, it was my day. I was so lucky that I got all of the functions. Then we went on the Relays. I screwed the team up this time. Instead of answering 2k, I, confusingly, answered k/2.

The result:

• Max and I got a perfect score on the Leapfrog. However, there were another two teams got perfect too. So, UM will send us the medals later.
• Our team got the second overall performance award in large school division.