Joy Wang ‘17 finishes in top 20 in state math competition

Jinyu “Joy” Wang ’17 earned 12th place in the Pre-Calculus portion of the Florida Gulf Coast University Invitational Mathematics Competition, which was held on December 12, 2015 on the campus in Fort Myers, Florida.

“It’s pretty exciting because this was the second competition I’ve ever entered in my entire life,” said Joy, who is a 7-day boarder from Shenzhen, China. “I have to admit I was pretty tired, though, because the competition started at 8 a.m. And we had to leave Farragut around 3:30 in the morning so we could get there in plenty of time.”

Joy, who is in her second year at Farragut, was one of 12 Upper School students who participated in the event, which is geared toward encouraging students to develop a strong interest and aptitude in mathematics. Our students spent the entire day competing against approximately 1,100 other students from 49 other schools in the state of Florida. Farragut was represented in all six subject areas: Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, Pre-Calculus, Statistics, and Calculus. Each student attended both individual and team contests, and each test was about ninety minutes long.

After taking an hour-long test in the individual portion of Pre-Calculus and a subsequent 30 minute break, Joy then teamed up with classmate Rachel Goldstein ‘16 for the group section of Pre-Calculus. The results were not revealed until this past week and Joy received word she had placed in the top 20 on January 15.

“It’s great to be able to represent the school in that way,” said Joy, who takes mostly Advanced Placement classes while also competing on the girls varsity soccer team.

The other participants included:

Algebra 1

• Angela Lorusso
• Sean Boland

Algebra 2

• Ruiqi Liu
• Cory Burke

Geometry

• Jose Lynch
• Jack Prior

Pre-Calculus

• Jinyu Wang
• Rachel Goldstein

Statistics

• Zhuoyuan Xu
• Dean Wayment-Steele

Calculus

• Xuan Wang
• Sashinya Desilva