Four members of the Greenhill Math Team placed in the 2024 Metroplex Math Competition on Jan. 13. The members competed at Fort Worth Country Day School, and each placed in their respective events.
As a leading member of the team, senior Aditya Pulipaka received first place in both Statistics and Calculus.
Sophomore Justin Wu placed second in Precalculus and Calculus, and senior Dibyadeep Saha was third in both. Freshman August Nguyen received third place for Algebra II.
“It was overall a great math contest,” Saha said. “We got to apply our normal, conceptual stuff into more problem-solving stuff.”
Greenhill’s team worked collectively on ten problems, trying to answer quicker than their opponents. The team members also worked on subjects individually.
Nguyen, Wu and Pulipaka all competed in closed divisions for an individual subject, whereas Saha only participated in open divisions.
Essentially, closed divisions are only accessible to competitors who are currently taking the math class for the subject they entered in. The open division is for any competitors, most likely those who have taken the class in the past.
The team members often do not prepare for their competitions.
“We don’t prep for these contests,” Head Coach of the Greenhill Math Team Kent Thele said. “I hope that the top students wouldn’t need to cram for a test, so this is a similar idea.”
Thele’s job with the team is to find competitions, something he hopes to do more of in the future.
“We usually just enter the ones we’ve competed in before,” Thele wrote in an email. “Every so often, we get an email advertising another contest.”
The American Mathematics Competition leads to the Metroplex Math Competition and invites a group of Dallas private schools to compete in a division of their choosing.
The math students showed success in this competition, and say they hope it is the first of many victories.
“I liked the application from normal math to these problems, and would really like to do more,” Saha said.
Looking forward, Thele says he hopes to find more opportunities for this group so they can challenge their thinking and bring pride to Greenhill.
