Who Wants to be A Mathematician
“Who Wants to Be A Mathematician is a competition sponsored by the American Mathematical Society in which high school students compete for cash and prizes by answering multiple choice mathematics questions. Regional games occur across the country throughout the school year. In the Who Wants to Be a Mathematician Championship, students from schools in nine regions in the U.S., one from nearby the host city for the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), one from Canada, and one from the United Kingdom compete for a US$10,000 first prize at the Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in January. The 12 students qualify for the Championship by taking two rounds of tests in the fall, most doing so online courtesy of our technology sponsor Maplesoft. Every school in the U.S. and Canada that participates in qualifying receives a gift certificate from Art of Problem Solving. Each student who takes the test and successfully completes three online challenges receives three one-year licenses to Wolfram”
How do I get started? Click here.
How do I expand this narrative arc? If math is part of your narrative arc consider doing one of the following:
Enter one of the math national and international math competitions including Purple Comet!, the American Mathematics Competitions or the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament.
Explore the types of math problems faced by real world mathematicians in the team-based MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge
Challenge yourself to practically apply your math skills at Wharton’s Data Science Academy
HOT TIP: National math competitions are a great way to challenge yourself and deepen your exposure to different types of math problems. Keep in mind that they are a very common extracurricular for kids who love math and might even want to study it in college. This makes it both a great environment to network and make friends in that community, and a potential issue if you want to stand out from your Math Club teammates. Have fun with math competitions, but also think about ways that you can enhance and diversity your profile by supplementing with math-adjacent or more applied-math activities.