Exeter Math Takes First at Competition

The Phillips Exeter Academy Red Lions (PEARL), otherwise known as the varsity math team, continued its five year winning streak last Saturday at the annual Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament (HMMT). Veteran seniors Alec Sun, Qi Qi, Yannick Yao and Matt Hambacher competed in the event, alongside uppers James Lin and Vinjai Vale as well as lowers Adam Bertelli and Victor Luo. Although the team has historically dominated at the tournament, taking home the championship for the sixth year in a row, the HMMT turned out to be much more competitive than expected.

“The prestige of the competition makes PEARL’s victory all the more exciting. Given that the HMMT is probably the biggest and best short-answer competition for high-schoolers.”

HMMT holds two tournaments each year: one in November and the other in February. The latter, which the Red Lions just attended, is among one of the most prestigious math competitions open to high schoolers. The competition draws some of the most distinguished participants from around the country and the globe. There are two team rounds and three individual rounds, featuring questions similar in difficulty to those seen in the International Math Olympiad (IMO). The team that placed second represented the state of Texas, while the team that placed third represented the San Francisco Bay Area. Math Club Advisor and Math Instructor Zuming Feng said, “We expected a tough competition.”The majority of schools come from big regional and top math and science magnet schools. “The prestige of the competition makes PEARL’s victory all the more exciting. Given that the HMMT is probably the biggest and best short-answer competition for high-schoolers,” said senior Alec Sun. “We’re totally thrilled that we were able to defend the first place.”The team’s first event was the proof-based round, where it had to answer ten questions in ascending order of difficulty. Yao said the team had walked in there with a strategy. “We started practicing about two weeks before the tournament so we knew which people would solve each problem and we chose their strong suit,” he said. However, the problems turned out to be much harder than expected, leaving little wiggle room for the team. “We didn't even have time to attempt the later problems,” Yao said. Feng added that due to a weighted scoring system, the team’s less than optimal performance in the first round meant that, in order to finish first, the team couldn’t afford to lose any points in the following rounds.Lin said that it faced another unexpected difficulty that kept them from applying its strategy, as Yao, one of the team’s strongest members, got stuck with a particularly hard problem and thus could not contribute on other problems like he usually does. However, the team remained optimistic. “Our captain Yannick would go around checking on us, reminding us to focus on the next round and forget the mistakes we made,” Vale said. “We could tell going out of the team round that we didn't do too well. It really helped bring the team together and made us focus on what was coming up.”Despite the challenges of the first round, the team was not disconcerted going into the next rounds. “Given how hard it was, we thought to ourselves that it must be hard for everyone, so we didn't lose hope. We tried hard in the individual round and went for problems that we could solve,” Yao said. Lin was optimistic as well, saying, “Although we were 110 points behind, we knew that our best rounds were still ahead of us.”The team did exceptionally well in the individual round which tested the competitors on Algebra/Number Theory, Geometry and Combinatorics. Yao placed 1st, Lin placed 3rd, Sun placed 10th and senior Qi Qi placed 23rd. PEARL won this round, putting themselves in the running for first.The final round—an intense 80-minute session where groups are presented nine sets of four problems in ascending difficult— would follow. The scores are calculated and entered into a live display in real time. Although the scores for the previous and individual and group rounds had not been published, the team could sense that it was not the front-runner. The team looked forward to the challenge. “When there’s pressure, you just divert all your mental strength to the four problems,” Vale said. He described the intense mentality that result from the round, saying, “For each pair, there was just one problem in the whole universe at that moment in time.”This mentality proved useful as the team that would finish as the runner-ups, the Texas Horned Toads, were literally neck and neck with Exeter. “We told ourselves to not look at it because one moment we would be in first place, but then the next we would be in second after the runner-up team from Texas submitted their problem,” Vale said.However, PEARL persevered, and went on to beat the Horned Toads by an unprecedentedly narrow 13-point margin. “We barely beat the next team,” said Yao. “We needed every single point we could.” Lin agreed, noting that the intensely competitive nature of the tournament made the team’s victory even more rewarding. “It was pretty incredible when we found out we won,” he said, “and the lucky win certainly made the victory sweeter.” Feng described this memorable competition as his Super Bowl, while Vale described the victory as “exhilarating.” Following the competition, the team continued its annual tradition of having dinner at Kume Hibachi with its coach, celebrating the continuation of its winning streak and unwinding from the strenuous competition.As the celebration comes to an end, PEARL is already looking to continue its winning streak at next year’s competition. The team will be graduating four out of its eight members. In their absence, Lin says he will step up to lead the team, which is determined to work hard enough to compensate for the departure of their teammates. PEARL’s upper and lower members are looking forward to leading the team back to victory and defending Exeter’s title for the seventh consecutive year.