The symmetry of an inaugural math competition being held in Ratio Hall seems only fitting.
More than 100 middle school and elementary school students will gather Saturday at Wentz Science Center for the first Aquahouse Tutoring-North Central College Mathematics Tournament
The contest on the Naperville college campus is the brainchild of Karen Ge, a junior at Naperville North High School.
A former math contest state champion, Ge founded Aquahouse Tutoring as a specialized student-led tutoring service for mathletes and students who want to improve their math scores on the SAT, ACT and the Cognitive Abilities Test.
Saturday’s tournament is open to students in eighth grade and younger, and the top five contestants receive cash prizes or free copies of Ge’s book on how to win math contests.
Ge said while high schools offer many activities for students to express their talents, fewer options are open to students in middle school.
“The real benefit is to bring to students together. The whole competition is fun for middle schoolers,” she said.
Ge didn’t always like math.
In sixth grade she joined the MATHCOUNTS team at Kennedy Junior High School at her parents’ behest.
Before then, Ge viewed math as rote memorization of times tables and formulas.
“That is not what math is about,” she said.
The Kennedy team has been state champion seven of the last eight years.
Today Ge sees the creativity of math and appreciates how people can solve the same problem through two different methods. The collaborative aspect of working together as a team also appeals to Ge.
“Math is a great example of inquiry and lifelong learning,” she said.
While Ge came up with the idea for the tournament, she needed somewhere to hold it and sought advice from North Central College’s Richard Wilders.
In addition to being a mathematics professor, Wilders is director of the Lederman Scholars, a program for academically gifted middle and high school students who can earn a year or more of college credit at North Central while they attend high school or are home-schooled. He also serves as a faculty mentor to Ge, who took math and computer sciences courses at North Central through Lederman Scholars.
Wilders sees the synergy of North Central hosting the math tournament. “We always like smart people hanging around,” he said.
Students will have an hour to complete the 30-problem test, drafted by Ge and Aquahouse Tutoring.
“I’m interested to see what they came up with,” Wilders said.
To make it more challenging, every answer is a three-digit whole number.
Wilders said many tests students take are multiple choice, which allows someone to either guess or input the answers into the equation.
“That’s what we want to discourage,” Ge said.
With 999 combinations of numbers, “you don’t have enough time to plug in 999 numbers,” Wilders added.
While students are taking the test, college staff will share with parents information about what’s available for pre-college students at North Central and early information about the college’s application process.
After the test is complete, Wilders will give a talk to students and their parents while test scores are tallied. His topic — “Mathematicians You Should Know” — will include such important experts as Iran-born Maryam Mirzakhani, Australian-American Terence Tao, India’s Srinivasa Ramanujan, Germany’s Johannes Kepler, Austrian Kurt Gödel and Italy’s Leonardo Pisano Bigollo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci.
Proceeds of the sale of Ge’s book, “The Three-Year MATHCOUNTS Marathon,” provided the money to purchase Amazon gift cards for the first-, second- and third-place winners.
Besides a back-cover acknowledgment from Wilders, Ge scored a bit of a coup when former Naperville resident Albert Ni, one the first five employees at Dropbox, agreed to write the book’s forward.
Ge reached out to Ni via email and was “very grateful” at his response.
In his remarks, he said her book is “more than a set of problems and solutions. It’s the collection of an artist, painstakingly curated into a gallery celebrating the joy of math.”
Also a Kennedy Junior High School alum, Ni won first place in the 2002 national MATHCOUNTS competition.
“Basically he’s a legend at Kennedy,” Ge said.
Ni double-majored in computer science and theoretical math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now advises a variety of industries.
