Penn MathCon Team, David Kim repeat as national champions

Penn High School’s Mathcon Team earned a second consecutive national championship, and senior David Kim repeated as an individual national champion at the MathCon National Championships at the University of Illinois Chicago on April 22.

 

MathCon is a national mathematics competition for students in grades 5-12. First, there is an online qualifying contest lasting 45 minutes. Approximately 50,000 students participated in this online qualifier. A total of 576 students qualified to go to Chicago for compete at the national event, which was the top 1 percent of the online scores. There were 43 states were represented at the nationals in Chicago.

 

Penn qualified 19 students for the nationals. The national contest consists of 50 questions and lasts 75 minutes. Individual awards are then determined for each grade level and for the best high school and middle school. Out of Penn’s 19 national qualifiers, 17 won an award.

 

“I would credit our success to our commitment for our academic extracurricular activities at Penn,” Penn Math Instructor and MathCon coach Brad Grounds said. “We offer many opportunities to help these students develop their problem solving skills with Indiana Math League, the American Mathematics Competition, Trig-Star, and Math Academic Super Bowl (weekly meetings practicing higher level problem solving).”

 

Seniors:

David Kim              National Champion (2nd year in a row)

Dat Luong             Gold Medal

Matthew Shan     Bronze Medal

Mason Lee            Bronze Medal

Muqsit Buchh      Honorable Mention

Baker Nasser       Honorable Mention

 

No junior qualifiers

 

Sophomores:

Tina Lu                   Silver Medal

Corey Wang         Honorable Mention

Chelsea Chen      Honorable Mention

Hasaan Kazi         National qualifier

 

Freshmen:

Seunghoon Sun     Bronze Medal

Lyvia Li                      Honorable Mention

Jeffrey Du                Honorable Mention

David Simonetti    Honorable Mention

Noah Lang              Honorable Mention

Tara Devaraj           Honorable Mention

Abhinov Kotaru    Honorable Mention

Rajeev Datta          Honorable Mention

Yewon Oh               National qualifier