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| Math Olympiad & Program Solving Training Programs |
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F110 - Introductory Problem Solving
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F120 - Intermediate Problem Solving
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F130 - Introductory Problem Solving
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E120 - Honors Algebra Problem Solving
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E130 - Honors Geometry Problem Solving
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E210 - Introductory Math Competitions
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E220 - Intermediate Math Competitions
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E230 - Advanced Math Competitions
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G210 - Introductory Math Olympiad
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G220 - Intermediate Math Olympiad
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G230 - Advanced Math Olympiad
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N220 - Intermediate Physics Olympiad |
| Upcoming Events |
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October 1 - October 10
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Dear Friends of Avid Academy,
Welcome to The Avid Learner, an online newsletter of Avid Academy for Gifted Youth. |
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FREE AMC 8 Exam |
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Registration is now open for the American Mathematics Contest 8 (AMC 8) - an exam for junior high students who excel in math and want more challenging opportunities to flex their math skills.
In addition to the satisfaction of testing one's knowledge, there are a variety of awards for those who score high. These awards range from certificates to entry to even more selective tests, like the American Mathematics Contest 10 (AMC 10). If a student can pass every subsequent test, he or she has the opportunity to make it onto the elite United States of American Math Olympiad team.
Avid Academy will sponsor this exam free of charge to talented students in Orange County.
Date: November 18, 2008
Time: 7:00 - 8:00 pm
Location: DeNault Auditorium (Grimm Hall),
Concordia University, Irvine
Registration deadline is November 11th. For more information and a registration form, please visit 2008 AMC 8 Registration. |
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Southern California ARML Team Practice Began |
| Southern California ARML (American Regional Mathematical Leatue) Team has started its practice sessions for the 2008 - 2009 season. Coached by Dr. Kent Merryfield, professor of mathematics at California State University at Long Beach, the team is a great opportunity to hone math skills, meet other gifted peers, and practice for competitions.
The SoCal ARML team will also participate in the annual ARML competition in May, where they will compete against more than 400 international teams at the University of Las Vegas (and other test sites). Last year, the SoCal ARML team finished fifth in the nation.
Next date: Saturday, October 11
Time: 1:00 - 4:00pm
Location: Cal State Long Beach
Room 345 in building LA5
Subsequent meetings will be held at the same time and place on November 8 and December 13.
For more details, please visit the Southern California ARML Team. |
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Raising the Bar Too High Leaves Every Child Behind |
The California state board has just made a policy change that will affect all of our children, for better or for worse - by 2011, they expect every 8th grader to be enrolled in mandatory algebra classes. This decision is the latest attempt from the administration to raise the bar in academics, although similar policy changes in the past have done more harm than good.
When every 8th grade child is required to take an algebra class (considered "advanced math" before high school), the brighter children will be frustrated if the rest of the class goes at a slower pace, while the slower learners may be left in the dust altogether.
Although many of the gifted math students in Orange County will study Geometry in 8th grade, the consequence of the policy will likely push more unprepared students into Geometry in 8th grade; therefore, the quality of the Geometry classes will also be diluted.
To learn more, please read the article by LA Times Reporter, Howard Blume, California's new 8th-grade algebra rule gets some poor marks.
Also: a new report from the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution definitively finds that the nation's push to challenge more students by placing them in advanced math classes has had unintended (and damaging) consequences. To learn more about the report, please read a Summary of the Brookings Institute Report. |
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Ten East Coast Boarding Schools Visit Irvine |
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Ever considered a boarding school? If your child doesn't feel academically challenged at their current school, a boarding school may be an option. On October 21st, ten East Coast boarding schools will hold a conference/open house in Irvine. See if boarding school is the right choice for you and your child, and if so, which one would be the best choice.
Date: October 21
Time: 7:00 - 8:30pm
Location: Irvine Marriott 18000 Von Karman Avenue Irvine, CA 92612 To learn more about these institutions and RSVP for the event, please visit the Ten Schools Admissions Organization. |
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UCLA Finds the Largest Prime Number to Date |
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On September 27, Avid Academy 6th grade students were learning about the ways to identify prime numbers. Just a few days afterwards, it was reported that UCLA discovered the largest prime number yet:
243,112,609 - 1
UCLA computer scientists actually identified the prime number on August 26, but like any scientific discovery, the results need to be independently verified. One month later, three independent research teams verified that the number is indeed the largest prime number discovered to date.
This is the first prime number to exceed 10 million digits. UCLA's mathematical and computational feat is especially impressive considering that thousands of people all over the world have been trying to find this elusive number, participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). The odds of finding any Mersenne number are about one in 150,000.
To find this mathematical needle in a haystack, the UCLA team programmed the computers in their Science/Math Lab to constantly run algorithms using unused power. Most computers only use a small percentage of their potential power. So Edson Smith, the leader of this team, figured that they could find this complex number just by running the algorithms through rows of commonplace desktop PCs.
Once they got the number, an independent research team from Sun Microsystems verified that the number could not be divided by another number except one and itself. To verify it, they also used the method of using unused computer power by running 8 computers for 13 days straight.
For their discovery, the team seems primed to win at least half of a $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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The Best at Math Will Stress Less |
According to Laurence Shatkin, Ph.D., author of 150 Best Low Stress Jobs, one of the least stressful jobs is that of the mathematician. Shatkin explains that "Mathematicians are not under pressure as this isn't life and death; they're dealing with theoretical realms."
Although a mathematician's salary would help to relieve any math-related stress - about $87,000 on average - it must be said that a Ph.D. in mathematics is the minimum requirement to become one. The stress of getting a doctorate might just be worth staying stress-free for the rest of your life.
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UCI Scientists Join the Search for God's Particle |
Even though the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is located in Geneva, Switzerland, several local physicists from UCI are involved with the project in major ways. Andy Lankford, a physics professor at UCI, is at the head of the ATLAS project, with the help of assistant physics professors Anyes Taffard and Daniel Whiteson. ATLAS is one of the LHC's four particle detectors, which acquires and helps to decipher the data produced by the LHC. These three will help the other scientists to ensure the accuracy of the numbers. While the ATLAS team works with hard data, other UCI faculty members are working in a more abstract realm. Jonathan Feng, a physics and astronomy professor, is a theorist for the LHC. As a theorist, his job is to help the experimentalists with defining their particle searches; as an astronomer, he is most interested in dark matter. Other theorists for the LHC include Arvind Rajaraman, who builds models for new physics; Yuri Shirman, who will help to refine the theory models; and Mu-Chun Chen, a particle theorist who focuses on neutrinos. To learn more about UCI's research on partical physics or the researchers involved, please visit A New Physics Frontier. |
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Stephen Hawking Bets Against the LHC |
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Stephen Hawking has so little faith in the LHC discovering God's Particle that he reportedly bet 100 dollars against it. Hawking recently told BBC Radio that although the LHC will increase the possibility of finding the Higgs -- or God's Particle -- by a factor of four, he doubts that the LHC will truly find this elusive particle.
"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs," Hawking said. "That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again."
Hawking believes that the more likely results of the LHC will discover supersymmetric partners of particles that already exist, which would further confirm some of Hawking's theories about dark matter.
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USA Wins the Gold in Swimming, Tennis, Basketball... and Computational Linguistics?
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Although most of the world was fascinated by the Olympics this year in Beijing, the US dominated in a smaller worldwide competition - the International Computational Linguistics Olympiad in August. The high school students representing the United States brought home 11 out of 33 awards, many of them gold medals; quite a feat considering that this is only the second year that the US team has participated. Soon, the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will be underway once more, and bright students everywhere will compete to join this exclusive team combining math and language skills. The best of the best in this competition will go on to represent the US in the International Olympiad. Thanks to our reader, Yolanda Jacobs, who brought this event to our attention. For more information on this year's results, please read Team USA Bring Home the (Linguistics) Gold. To learn about how to qualify for the aforementioned Linguistics competitions, please visit North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. | |
I hope you enjoyed the information provided in this newsletter. Thank you for supporting gifted education in Southern California. If you have comments to improve our newsletters or would like to share articles, resources and ideas with our community, please email me at Dr.Li@AvidAcademy.com.
Sincerely,
James Li, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Avid Academy for Gifted Youth | |
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