AMC 8 Summary

This is a quick summary to start off your morning. Yesterday’s AMC-8 contest at Bard College went exceptionally well. We had 48 middle school students from around the area take the national AMC-8 exam, representing almost 20 different schools. The contest was followed by a wonderful math talk by Jim Belk and Maria Belk on the Mathematics of Rock, Paper, Scissor (want to know more? Read about Princeton mathematician John Nash and the Nash Equilibrium).

We’re all curious about the answers to the contest, and they’ll be published on November 20th on the AMC-8 website (http://amc.maa.org/e-exams/e4-amc08/amc8.shtml), but the really fun place to learn the solutions and interact with other young mathematicians is on the Art of Problem Solving discussion forum (www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/).

The organizers of the AMC 8 competition request that there be no public discussion until November 21, either in print or electronically, of the problems, to maintain the integrity of the competition. By the way, all the exam booklets were collected after the contest, but we’ll be returning them by mail at the beginning of next week.

On behalf of the Bard Math Circle and the Bard Math Department, thanks again for coming out to Bard yesterday to solve some challenging problems and learn some interesting mathematics. A big thanks to the parents who responded to our survey. We enjoyed meeting all of you in person at Bard, and we hope that you’ll join us soon for upcoming Bard Math Circle events.

Some comments received after the competition:

Hello!
Thank you to the Bard faculty, staff and students for hosting this competition and interesting math talk. As we left the event, my son expressed that he had fun and would definitely do this again.
Regards 

Thank you, my kids had a great time.

Thank you and [the] Bard Math Circle for hosting this event and constantly contributing to this area. We really appreciate it.

You and all the volunteers/staff at the AMC-8 contest were wonderful hosts, thank you so much for the event.  [My son] really enjoyed himself. Please keep us posted on any upcoming events.