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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
"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.
Tyrone Johnson was too busy playing basketball to compete in the math bee... Billy Bob was busy doing meth. What ethic groups have we missed here?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sounds like an idiot savant... have you considered teaching your "friend" to play blackjack? He might turn out to be really good at card-counting, a la "Rainman".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
These kids are definitely very good at abstraction and such. When you check the 4 minute clip, some questions are really about degrees and clocks etc.. so looks like they already have the trigonometry thing covered. By the time I actually understood what's asked, they already have the answer.
You tell my boss that his beloved golf is no real sport.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not a sport. It's a competition. Sports by definition require an element of physical exertion.
Areyou trying to make sport of him?
When I competed in this in the early 90s, we had two brothers on our team that both finished top 10 on the individual portion.
They then had a pyramid style competition to determine the individual winner. Our teammate was one of the last two standing. In the final, he buzzed in too early on multiple occasions (had to wait until they were done reading the question) and was DQ'd from answering that question. He knew the answer before the question was done. The other kid then had 30 seconds to work out it on his own, eventually getting it right.
He also ended up teaching our high school physics class because our teacher was not qualified. Smartest person I've ever known, extremely socialable as well. Very humble too.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
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.
Prakash Kumar Badalababoom.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
I started taking a foreign language class last night, & the teacher had only gone over certain letters. She started to write a word & then erased it because we had not learned one of the letters, but from past experience (I know the entire alphabet & a handful of words), I figured out what the rest of the word was from just the first 2 letters.
One obvious thing about 999,999,999 is that it is one less than 1 billion. So the most likely choices for divisor are those that are powers of 2 or 5. (3, 9, & 10 are trivial, & others are more tricky.) As for knowing it would be 32 rather than another power of 2 or 5: Powers of 5 are probably marginally more likely to be easier because they are emphasized more (or at least that was my experience in school). Too large or too small a power of 2 would be too easy. I would not necessarily have guessed 32 was the sweet spot (& hindsight is 20/20), but it is not impossible that someone would guess it right.
if you use pre-shellshock patch bash, world may own you
That one can actually spell.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
*cough*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
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.
Any number with a lot of zeros is going to divide by 2 a lot. Like "X0000000000000", because all those zeros will hold the remainder of the divisions of X. 32 is easily seen to be a power of 2. So all those divisions by 2 divide evenly into such a number. One less than the even division means the remainder will be one less than that division. So "31". I could not do it so fast the first time. But if you knew this or seen it before, all such questions would be rather easy. The same is true for IQ questions. The first time you see them is the only time I think they have meaning.