Since the insomnia seems to have cleared up, I set an alarm this morning so that I could be sure to be at work in time for the doughnuts and the showing of the MATHCOUNTS National Countdown finals. MATHCOUNTS always happens on the east coast, so we have to get up far too early to watch it here in California.

You might not be familiar with MATHCOUNTS or Countdown. That’s fine. I hadn’t heard of either until I started this job. MATHCOUNTS is the major math contest for middle school kids, and each state (or state-like region or other such entity) sends four kids and an adult to the finals for a long weekend every May. On Saturday and Sunday there are a bunch of written rounds (alone, in a group, with a calculator, without a calculator, whatever, I’m not really sure how the details all work). The 12 students with the best scores on the written rounds get to participate in Countdown which is a single elimination tournament that is broadcast on ESPN. Not the main ESPN; one of the minor ones, like the one that shows the spelling bee.

Each match features a pair of students (based on their initial seeding) in a five-problem round, and they have to answer questions like “What’s the remainder when \(2018^{2018}\) is divided by 20?” Whichever student has answered more questions correctly at the end of the round moves on to the next round.

What is interesting is that usually Lou DiGioia is the moderator of the Countdown competition. Up until fairly recently Lou was the Executive Director of MATHCOUNTS, but he left earlier this year to lead DECA. So instead Wesley Crusher Wil Wheaton moderated Countdown. It did not go flawlessly, but he did a really good job of dealing with the various minor mishaps. I’m sure that a lot of the teachers appreciated the choice of moderator more than the kids did.

Reprising the finals from last year, it was Luke R. versus Andrew C. Luke won again, becoming the first two-time National champion in MATHCOUNTS history. With both Luke and Andrew exhausting their eligibility, a lot of eyes are on Jessica W. (a sixth grader who was the 5 seed coming into the finals) to dominate the competition in the coming years.

And so, MATHCOUNTS is over for the year.

Fun fact: 102 users of our site logged in from the IP address of the hotel wifi where the MATHCOUNTS finals were being held.