Once again, ARML has come and gone. This year marks the 10th consecutive ARML that I’ve attended. It was really fun seeing old timers and meeting so many great kids for the first time. I even met a few really cool kids from Dalton and Horrace Mann! Of course, then there’s the usual suspects from Stuyvesant and Hunter… but we all know those schools suck

NYC Math Team did very well this year, and placed third nationally. Taoran Chen from NYC Math team even took top honors at ARML, and placed first individually!

I of course, will always have a soft spot for Baltimore’s team, which once again improved significantly in its rankings under Raymond Cheong. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if Baltimore wins it all within the decade .

Florida also did very well, and I’m really happy to see Chenyu Lin kicking ass at ARML after all the work he’s put in!

Incidentally, I had written an earlier post about ARML’s financials being questionable. This year, ARML actually disclosed fairly detailed financial information to all the coaches and asked for approval. Personally, I still don’t think ARML is running as financially lean as it could (and some of its expenses are kind of odd), but I really appreciate its new efforts in increasing transparency. Given what I do, It’s probably true that I expect organizations to run much tighter ships than normal.

I’ve actually been thinking about making this year the last ARML that I attend, and quitting all math competition related endeavors by next year. This year’s ARML is definitely making my decision much harder….

High school students who compete in math team competitions have probably heard of the American Regions Math League, or ARML for short. Many states struggle to come up with enough funding to send their kids to this prestigious competition, so I decided to look through their tax forms to see how efficient this organization is. (All non-profit tax forms are available at guidestar free of charge). The below chart is what resulted from my analysis (note this is not all of ARML’s expenses, executive compensation and conference costs have been left out on purpose):

There are several things of note here.

1. How does the current arml.com cost $1,000 to develop and $215 a yr to maintain?
2. Granted ARML is not an easy competition to write, but does it really warrant an average of $5,000 annually to develop the competition? (That’s excluding the $2,800 paid to the head question writer annually.)
3. ARML claims to be an organization dedicated to its participants, then why is the amount dedicated to student awards so low in 2005? (2003: $11,171, 2004: $18,116, 2005: $7,566)

Outside of the purely quantitative data, I’m also increasingly annoyed at ARML’s board for making ARML a cesspool of commercial spam. At last year’s Penn State ARML award ceremony, some prizes were given alongside what amount to sales pitches for companies. If ARML is going to be TI’s lapdog, they should at least charge significantly more than a few calculators.

It is also infuriating to see teams spending significant amount of money just on traveling to one of three designated test sites. It seems like this year, two teams from Turkey will be participating in ARML via the web (news release here), why can’t teams from the US do that as well?

The American Mathematics Competitions, or AMC, has quietly amended its rules for calculator usage. (Incidentally, the AMC is undergoing a major overhaul of its website, check it out!)

Starting in 2008, no calculators will be allowed on the AMC 8 / 10 / 12.

I am not sure whether this would prompt similar rules changes for NYSML and ARML, but I expect the number of AIME qualifiers to drop noticeably next year. After all, I myself depended on the TI-89 quite a bit when I took the AMC exams!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Kids who are turned off by math often say they don’t enjoy it, they aren’t good at it and they see little point in it. Who knew that could be a formula for success?

The nations with the best scores have the least happy, least confident math students, says a study by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

Countries reporting higher levels of enjoyment and confidence among math students don’t do as well in the subject, the study suggests. The results for the United States hover around the middle of the pack, both in terms of enjoyment and in test scores.

In essence, happiness is overrated, says study author Tom Loveless.

Click HERE for CNN’s full reporting.

This past weekend marked the successful culmination of another NYSML (New York State Mathematics League). During the opening ceremony this year, multiple speakers made references to Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat.

The premise of this book is that the information explosion that has happened in the last 10 years has transformed the business arena into a fast paced global free-for-all. While I agree with the premise of the book, and recommend it as a must read, I believe NYSML is actually a quintessential example of why the US will not be left behind in this global transformation.

I have been attending NYSML since I was 13, which makes the 2006 NYSML the 9th consecutive NYSML that I’ve attended. Over the course of these 9 years, I have made many great friends, received job offers, and even had bouts of romances because of NYSML. However, what has been most gratifying to me in the past 9 years is watching new groups of kids and coaches come to NYSML each year on an early Saturday morning, for no other reason than their passion and enthusiasm for mathematics.

As NYSML 2006 ended, and a new leadership team (including the hilariously witty George Reuter) is put in place; I am excited and relieved to see that even though the world is now flat, the US is still very much in the race.

In the last 4 years, I have had the pleasure of leading and learning from a wonderful groups of kids through The Baltimore County Math Team. The Baltimore County Math Team took a hiatus for two years due to various reasons, but this year, it’s coming back stronger than ever under the leadership of Raymond Cheong (M.D. PhD).

I would however, like to use this post to celebrate and recognize the early accomplishments (college acceptances!) of these extraordinary kids!

• Li – MIT
• Alex – U of Washington, St. Louis
• Rachelle – UMD, College Park
• Mariah – U of Chicago
• Daniel – Caltech
• Charles – Johns Hopkins
• Tamas – Caltech
• Justine – MIT
• Drew – MIT

I’m sure they are going to accomplish great things in the future, glad I had the opportunity to influence some of their development

I’ve been a part of many different organizations, from startups to sitting on boards of long established entities. The two things that annoy me to no end are:

• the superificial advisory boards (very nicely covered by Ed Sim in his blog entry)
• the complete lack of transparency in how an organization is run (especially in financial matters)

The second point I consider especially important for non-profit organizations in the post Sarbanes Oxley Era. I think the publically available 990s go a long way towards such financial transparency, but I believe all documents that is needed in order to compile a 990 should also be available.

Update: Since writing this post, I have spoken with the Director of the MAA, Mrs. Tina Straley and the director of the AMC, Dr. Steve Dunbar over several issues I had concerns with (including but not limited to the issues listed below). They were both very open and frank with me and I no longer have any outstanding issues with either organization! (The below post is preserved in its entirety simply for historical accuracy).

The impetus behind this post is my recent debacle with the AMC and its parent assocation, MAA. The AMC stands for American Mathematics Competition, and represents MAA’s sub-organization that runs the premier mathematics competitions in the high school level. Most of the people involved with the AMC (including me), are purely volunteers and I myself strongly believe that it should stay that way. What is concerning to me however, is that even with its mostly volunteer structure, the AMC currently spends around 1 million dollars each fiscal year (1,212,225 in 2004 to be exact). How does the AMC spend 1.2 million dollars in 2004? From what I can gather from MAA’s publically available 2004 990:

• Contract to University of Nebraska: $699,749
• Grant to AMC staff: $53,700
• Not a line item on 990: $458,776

I believe that the second bullet is justified. To the question why the other two bullets have such large numbers, your guess is as good as mine….

Those of you who have attended ARML probably knows that Lehigh Valley came out of nowhere in order to capture Division A. (NYC, wtf is going on, I think it’s all Gehoon’s fault). I think they deserve much props for what they have accomplished, hence I’m posting this article on my blog.

”Consider an analog clock with an hour and a minute hand but no numerals. At Time T a.m., a mirror image of the clock shows a time X a.m. that is 5 hours and 28 minutes later than T. Compute T in terms of hours and minutes.”

(The answer: 3:16 a.m.)

That was one of only a few questions I could even understand, much less solve, in an annual high school team competition held by the American Regions Mathematics League.

The 91 U.S. and four Asian math teams competed simultaneously June 4 at the University of Iowa, San Jose State and Penn State. The top winner was the Lehigh Valley team, with students from nine high schools in eastern Pennsylvania and one in New Jersey.

I did not know about that stunning triumph because I missed a small story that ran June 8 in The Morning Call. It was in the back pages of the local section — in only certain editions of the paper, at that. I learned of it only via an angry letter from Terry Delph of Coopersburg, a Lehigh University engineering professor.

”They [the Lehigh Valley team] are the national math champs, defeating teams from all over the nation, including several from elite private schools,” Delph’s letter said.

”By rights, this kind of achievement should have been front-page news,” he wrote. ”However, it was buried in the back pages of the local section. … I’ll leave you to imagine the coverage that a comparable sports performance would have received.”

As it happens, The Morning Call did have a big splash about a sports event that day. An Emmaus High School soccer team won a state semifinal game — and the story was promoted on the front page with a color photograph.

I asked Morning Call Assistant Managing Editor Michael Miorelli about the math story.

”We screwed up. It should have gotten better play,” he replied. (Can you picture a politician being that candid?)

Anyway, the Lehigh Valley team is coached by Don Davis, a math professor at Lehigh.

”It is extremely rare, I think, for a Lehigh Valley team to win a national championship in anything,” he said.

I decided to consult the world’s foremost math authority — my brother, Neal, who is a math teacher in California. I recited the clock question and told him how to find the other questions on the Internet.

A half-hour later, after Neal reviewed all the questions, we talked again. ”Very interesting questions,” he said. ”The one you mentioned is relatively easy. Some of the other ones are hard. As soon as we hang up, I’m going to go back and think about them some more.”

Coming from my brother, that admission of a challenge sounded like some dialogue from ”Good Will Hunting.”

Neal is familiar with ARML contests. ”Our kids compete in that,” he said. ”On awards day it was a big deal … that our eighth-graders won the competition for this region, which is a half-dozen counties.”

I told him the Lehigh Valley math team won the entire national competition, but the story ran on the back pages.

”That’s nuts!” Neal exploded in anger over The Morning Call’s priorities. I told him I planned a column about it.

”I’d really give ‘em hell,” he said. ”Raise a stink. See if you can get fired or something.”

Then Neal had one additional thought. He said the ARML contests have two divisions at the high school level, A and B.

”If it’s in the A Division, that’s really impressive,” he said, noting the higher division includes top math students from the country’s largest metropolitan areas. So I went back to Davis to ask.

”Division A. We beat everybody,” he said.

Fortunately, I am out of space, so I don’t have room to get myself fired by saying the play given to the Lehigh Valley math team’s triumph represents a journalistic disgrace.

a guy is waiting outside of a VIP club and is trying to gain access. he decides to listen to what people say to the doorman
to get in. he finds that the doorman will say a number, and that the customer will reply with a number to get in:

the first guy walks up, and the doorman says: “12″
the guy replies: “6″
and the doorman lets him in

the second guy walks up, and the doorman says: “6″
the guy replies: “3″
and the doorman lets him in

so the original guy thinks he has it figured out and walks up to the door. the doorman then says: “10″
so the man answers: “5″ – but he is not let in.

what should he have said to been given access to the VIP club?