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Who Wants to Be a Mathematician National Contest

Bill Butterworth, Evan O'Dorney, and Mike Breen

The 2012 contest will take place Friday, January 6 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston (from 9:30 to 11 in Hynes 312). Qualifying for the 2012 contest has now ended. Contestants were chosen based on their scores on a qualifying test, administered by teachers (or in the case of home-schooled students, by whomever does the teaching at home). Check back for names of the qualifiers and interviews with them.

Even if you can't make it to balmy Boston in January, you can enjoy the contest, which will be video-streamed live starting at 9:30 Eastern on January. (You can visit now and set up a reminder for January.)

The top prize is $5000 for the student and $5000 for the math department at his or her school. Qualifying ends October 19. There is no fee to participate.

Evan O'Dorney (at left, center) won the 2011 contest, which took place in New Orleans at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. This was Evan's second straight win--he won the first national contest in 2010 in San Francisco. He went up against Anthony Grebe, whose schoolmates were watching him on the live webcast, in the finals. View a slideshow of the semifinals, finals, and awards ceremony below.

(Photo of Who Wants to Be a Mathematician co-creator Bill Butterworth--DePaul Unversity--Evan O'Dorney, and Who Wants to Be a Mathematician host Mike Breen, by Annette Emerson)

All photos by E. David Luria

In the AMS game Who Wants to Be a Mathematician, high school students compete for cash and prizes by answering multiple choice mathematics questions. Meet the contestants who participated in the 2011 contest, based on their scores on a qualifying test. Those contestants, in alphabetical order, are:

Rohit Agrawal (who also qualified for the 2010 contest), Wayzata High School (MN)
Daniel Cooper, Jesuit High School (LA)
Anthony Grebe, Pine View School (FL)
Stephen Lamontagne, Barrington High School (RI)
Evan O'Dorney (three-time member of the USIMO team, who finished second overall in this summer's International Mathematical Olympiad), Venture School (CA)
Shonak Patel, Liberty High School (PA)
Richard Spence, Sonoran Science Academy (AZ)
Bryce Taylor, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
Noah Taylor, Pickerington High School (OH)
David Wise, Homeschooled (CO)

Here are the answers to the qualifying test for the 2011 national Who Wants to Be a Mathematician.


(Above photos from the 2010 contest by E. David Luria.)

2010 national contestants Meet the 10 contestants who participated in the first national contest of Who Wants to Be a Mathematician on Thursday, January 14, 2010 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco.

Partial support of the event comes from a National Science Foundation Distinguished Teaching Scholar's grant, held by Ken Ono (Emory University). In addition to the cash prizes, there were also prizes donated by: Texas Instruments, Maplesoft Inc., John Wiley & Sons, and the AMS. The game is a program of the AMS Public Awareness Office and was developed by Mike Breen (AMS Public Awareness Officer) and Bill Butterworth (DePaul University ).