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Seattle Seventh Grader Wins National Math Bee (ap.org)
Edward Wan, a Seattle-based seventh grader has won the national math bee. Wan, who studies at Lakeside Middle School, beat 224 other middle school students nationwide to win the 2016 Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition. From an Associated Press report: Competition officials said in a news release the 13-year-old won the final round by answering the question, "What is the remainder when 999,999,999 is divided by 32?" Wan gave the correct answer of 31 In just under seven seconds.Deadspin reports about the live streaming of the event: Today's Mathcounts national championship for middle-school mathletes aired on ESPN3, and it was definitely the best live sports anyone could be watching at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. We couldn't agree more.
It's not faaaaaaaaaair!
We need a safe space for kids who can't spell. Other than the comment threads at Salon.com, that is.
Must have been a slow day for sports. Given that there's international sports, you should probably be able to find something interesting to watch at any time of the day. Maybe the Giro D'Italia shouldn't have had a rest day.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Arithmetic. Americans seem unable to tell the difference (no pun intended).
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
But the ability to do arithmetic quickly in ones head is not necessarily something that correlates highly with more general purpose mathematical ability (abstraction, logical proof, recursion, differential equations, etc.)
I had a friend in school who was really good at arithmetic. He could multiply 4 digit numbers in his head. But he never got his head around trigonometry or calculus. Is he "good at math?"
Billy Bob Cradup?
"What is 10^10-1 mod 32?"
We start by checking if we can divide 1^10 by 2, five times (as 2^5=32) : 5x10^5, 2.5x10^5, 1.25x10^5, 6.25x10^4 and 3.125x10^4. The answer is yes, thus 10^10 mod 32 = 0, and 10^10-1 mod 32 = 31.
Maths is about understanding something the right way. And I'm guessing this kid did not take the seven seconds to do anything complicated. He just factored 32. i.e. 2^5. Then noticed that 999,999,999 + 1 = 1,000,000,000 = 10^10 = 2^10 * 5*10 which clearly contains a factor of 2^5. So 32 goes into 1,000,000,000. So the remainder after division of 999,999,999 by 32 is 31. I think you need about 2 seconds for that once you realise the correct way to think about it. So he took 5 seconds to work out what he should do. Quick kid!
My son competed in MathCounts as an 8th grader a number of years ago. Made it to the nationals in Texas, where he finished in the middle of the pack.
I went there with him, and even though I was just a parent (with an MS in math), I took it upon myself to assist the guy coaching our state's team. For two days, Coach and I escorted those four intelligent, lively, funny young people (one girl, three boys) to a barbecue, a science museum, and I forget where all else. The other kids' parents stayed at the hotel as well, but they all went their own way during the day. Can't understand why; we had a blast.
That same son is currently enrolled in the Math PhD program at the University of Chicago.
Hey, great way to dispel those stereotypes, Wan!!! Keep it up!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's not a sport. It's a competition. Sports by definition require an element of physical exertion.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
Is your anecdotal evidence proof that the ability to do arithmetic quickly in ones head does not correlate highly with general purpose mathematical ability?
10^n is evenly divisible by 2^n
Therefore 999,999,999 = 10^9-1. Therefore the remainder is -1 mod 32 which = 31.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
999,999,999 is 10^10-1, so we have (2*5)^10-1 mod 2^5. The (2*5)^10 part is 0 mod 2^5 since it has a 2^5 factor, so the answer is -1 mod 2^5. That's 31 if we write it in the form of the least non-negative integer representative.
Though TFA talks about a national competition, last year the American team has won the international Math Olympiad. For the first time in 21 years too.
Maybe, Bush's hated ideas of accountability for schools and teachers weren't entirely bad? Neah, can't be...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Chess (and checkers, even if only 10x10) are generally regarded as sport. Even poker might be...
Brain is part of the body and exerting it more often makes you a good sport... So to speak...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's why the the kid won a Maths B. Those who win real maths competitions tend to get As.
they're obviously terrorists.
Slightly raising one end of the student achievement curve indicates little.
Many authoritarian countries weed out most of the poorly performing students. This artificially raises their schools average performance against countries where the vast majority of children stay in the education system for most of their childhood.
Many of these same countries then focus resources on the top .0001% to win competitions. This result indicates nothing, and is probably inversely correlated with the true average performance of all children in the winning country.
time expr 999999999 % 32
31
real 0m0.008s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.003s
It should take less than 7 seconds to realize that 32 divides 1 billion evenly, so the answer is -1 mod 32. (Not the crappy truncate towards zero C kind of mod).
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Edward Wan is my personal friend and he swims on my swim team and goes to my writing class. Also, I was able to find the remainder of 99999/32 in under 2 seconds.
How about we collect all of these "Math/Arithmetic whiz kids" into a "Collective Intelligence" machine and predict some important stuff?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.