Nearly 100 Nebraska high schools brought 1,523 students to the 26th annual UNL Math Day on Nov. 19, 2015, hosted by the Department of Mathematics.
Soo Young Choi of Mount Michael Benedictine High School took home an $8,000 scholarship as the top individual winner. Lincoln East outdistanced Creighton Prep to win the PROBE 1 Class I team competition and defeated Omaha North for first place in the Class I bowl tournament.
Other classes’ PROBE I team winners were Lincoln Pius X, Mount Michael Benedictine, Omaha Brownell-Talbot, Harvard and Scott Middle School in Lincoln.
Scottsbluff, Omaha Skutt Catholic, Lincoln Christian, Harvard and Scott Middle School won the bowl tournaments in Classes II through VI, respectively. For more results, visit: http://math.unl.edu/programs/mathday/results-new.
Lincoln Southeast High School brought a record number of 119 students.
“We got students interested originally by appealing to their desire for a challenge. They like the difficulty of the PROBE exam and a chance to try to do well,” said Alan Holdorf, a mathematics teacher at Southeast.
Omaha Central brought 80 students to the event, nearly doubling the school’s average attendance.
“We’ve always wanted to send more because we had the interest,” said Greg Sand, math teacher at Omaha Central. “This year I added two additional teachers into the program, which allowed us to bring more kids. If I had my way, we’d bring all 186 kids we have involved in our Enrichment Mathematics course.”
Juan Torres, a sophomore at Scottbluff High School, attended his second Math Day in 2015 and shared with the department that Math Day “gave me a challenge that left me hungry for more math and an ambition to reach my full academic potential. The two times I have attended Math Day are the only times I have visited Lincoln. Going to UNL is an idea I enjoy thinking about and hope I can make come true in two years.”