Seattle Seventh Grader Wins National Math Bee (ap.org)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday May 10, 2016 @04:50AM from the these-kids-get-math dept.

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.

1 of 106 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Asian privilege by ShanghaiBill · 2016-05-10 06:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

When you get to the 999,999,999/13 part ...
It is 999,999,999/32. The 13 is his age. The problem is not so hard. 1,000,000,000 is 10^9 = 2^9*5^9, and 32=2^5, so obviously 1,000,000,000 is evenly divisible by 32, so one less is going to have a remainder of 31. Duh.
I don't know much about the Math Bee, but I coach kids for the Math Olympiad, and we do a lot of drills to break numbers down into prime factors, and rapidly compute powers of two. Solving a problem like this in seven seconds is impressive, but not uncommon for a kid that has been trained.