Santa Fe Christian has always prided itself on the excellency of its academics. A pillar of that excellence is the SFC math team, who has done especially well this year, with multiple accomplishments worth mentioning.
Led by SFC teacher Mike Maxon, the math team is comprised of over 30 brilliant Upper School students who compete in many top national and state math competitions each year. For the 2018-2019 school year, the math team is slated to participate in 12 different contests, committing to over 30 days of competition.
2018 Accomplishments
The math team is rising to the top in the California Math League Contest (CMLC), an online contest where CA high schools partake in five monthly matches (November through March). The SFC math team is currently ranked #10 in the state, surpassing 170 other schools. And as of the December 2018 contest results, the CMLS has recognized SFC students Jacob Doughty, Nils Roede and Andrew Chiang among their list of cumulatively “High Scoring Students.”
The math team is also currently contending in the Mandelbrot Competition, a state contest that holds rounds once a month, November through February. The questions on the Mandelbrot Competition cover a variety of non-calculus topics such as algebra, geometry, exponents, and a few others such as number theory and combinatorics. The problems in this competition are incredibly challenging —it is not uncommon for strong math students to earn zero points on a contest. Currently, the SFC math team is ranked #19 in the state, amid 68 teams total.
Another recent success worth noting was the team’s ranking in Math Madness, a weekly online competition that rallies 400 teams from schools across the nation. SFC was placed into a bracket of 64 teams, composed of all the largest math teams in the U.S. They made it to the “Elite Eight,” ending their season with an 8-1 record. Along the way, they achieved wins over top boarding schools and math/science academies.
What 2019 Holds for the SFC Math Team
So far, the SFC math team has risen to compete with some of the best and brightest in the state, and the nation. In 2019, they will face even bigger challenges, like the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) —the largest math contest in the world, with approximately 300,000 of the best math students competing. The test is worth 150 points, and in order to get ranked in the top 4,000 in the world, a student needs a score of 90 or above. Two students from SFC scored a 90 or above on the 2017 AMC test. One of those students was Paolo Pasco, whose score ranked him #314 in the U.S. He is currently studying computer science at Harvard. Other recent graduates of the SFC math team are currently STEM majors at colleges such as MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Emory, and Duke.
Other competitions to look forward to are the CCA Math Bonanza (February 2, 2019), the American Invitational Mathematics Exam (March 13, 2019), and the UCSD Honors Math Contest (April 20, 2019). Each year, the UCSD contest attracts nearly 30 of the best math teams in San Diego and Orange County. For the past four years straight, the SFC math team has ranked in fifth- and sixth-place at the UCSD contest.
For more information regarding the math team’s current standings in the California Math League Competition (CMLC) and/or the Mandelbrot Competition, please visit https://mathleague.com/and http://www.mandelbrot.org/.
Love math? SFC has over one hundred students in a math club from grades 3-12. If you are interested in finding out more about the math clubs or summer math camps, you can email Mike Maxon at mmaxon@sfcs.net.
