Trinity Sophomore takes Top Honors
 |
Left to Right: Rahul Ratna Shakya '11,
Young Ho Shin '11, and junior Ankit
Saraf '10. |
Hartford, Conn. - This spring semester, three Trinity College students took first place in the Central Connecticut State University Regional Mathematics Competition. The competition featured twelve teams, including MIT, Yale, Wesleyan, and the University of Connecticut, among others. Trinity sophomore Young Ho Shin finished first among all participants.
“We were definitely surprised,” Shin said about the results. “I don’t think anyone expected us to win.”
The teams consisted of at least three people. The participants took a three-hour long exam, the scores of which decided both the winning team and the winning individual. For teams with more than three people, scores were taken from that team’s top three scorers. Although Trinity had three students in all, other teams had as many as ten participants.
Shin was joined by junior Ankit Saraf and sophomore Rahul Ratna Shakya, who was added to the team on the day of the competition after being recruited by Young to meet the required minimum of three participants. Young and Saraf learned about the competition through fliers in the math department. They are engineering students.
“Math is a huge element of engineering,” Shakya said.
And while the three are dedicated to the field of engineering, the students recognize its integral relationship to mathematics. They said they are eager to strengthen their knowledge of mathematics to enhance their comprehension of engineering.
“I’m definitely getting more mathy,” Saraf joked about his increasing interest in the subject.
Vasil Gochev, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics, and Mohammad Javaheri, Harold L. Dowart Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics, organized the team for the CCSU competition. According to Javaheri, the competition was organized in the spirit of the Putnam exam, a national math competition that is held annually for undergraduate students. The Putnam exam is an extremely challenging examination in which nearly half of the participants receive a score of zero.
Saraf competed in the Putnam exam in 2006 and 2008, scoring each time. In 2006, Saraf ranked 937.5 out of 3,640 students from 508 institutions in the United States and Canada. According to Melanie Stein, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Trinity, alumnus Nhon Trinh ‘04 took the test three times, and ranked 181.5 nationwide in 2001, which was the best performance she has seen since she began managing the Putnam in 1997.
The students said that the team’s success in the regional tournament will encourage them to participate in other competitions, and they predict that enthusiasm for mathematics at Trinity will continue to grow.
“We are very proud of all their successes in these various mathematical competitions,” Stein said. “We hope that participating in them generates more excitement and enthusiasm about math.”
For more information on the competition, visit: http://clubs.ccsu.edu/mathclub/.