Archive for August 15th, 2010

Math Olympians

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

CIMG0897Eight young American women kicked butt in the 2010 China Girls Mathematical Olympiad held August 9 – 13 in Shijiazhuang, about 100 miles from Beijing. They brought home to the USA five gold medals, one silver medal, one bronze medal, and one honorable mention. Four of the girls are from California, three from right here in Silicon Valley. One of the gold medalists, Lynnelle Ye, proudly represents El Camino Real; she just graduated from Palo Alto High School, she’s been taking advanced math courses at Stanford University since her junior year, and she’ll be attending The Farm in the Fall.

The China Girls Mathematical Olympiad is an international event where young women attempt to solve six math problems in nine hours split over two days. No calculus is required but the problems are…challenging. Here are a couple samples I found from a similar competition.

  1. Prove that for each positive integer n, there are pairwise relatively prime integers k0, k1, …, kn, all strictly greater than 1, such that k0k1 … kn – 1 is the product of two consecutive integers.
  2. At a certain mathematical conference, every pair of mathematicians are either friends or strangers. At mealtime, every participant eats in one of two large dining rooms. Each mathematician insists upon eating in a room which contains an even number of his or her friends. Prove that the number of ways that the mathematicians may be split between the two rooms is a power of two (i.e., is of the form 2k for some positive integer k).

Ironically as you see the competitors are given the answers; they have to provide the proofs. It’s  the mathematical equivalent of essay  questions.

Palo Alto’s Lynnelle Ye as it turns out is a bit of a superstar, having placed fourth in the Intel Science Talent Search and second in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Don’t let their math prowess mislead you. From the blog postings they put up on the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute page, it’s clear they are well-balanced, bright teenagers who made the most of the extraordinary adventure they had touring China. Some excerpts:

“I’m the romantic fluffy type who wants to talk about the scenery, because Hong Kong is the coolest place on Earth. So cool that I even bought a few refrigerator magnets. I think I’m going to build my castle here when I grow up.”

“Yesterday, we went to Ocean Park for most of the day. It was awesome! We got to see a lot of animals, including giant pandas, red pandas, sea otters, chinese alligators/crocodiles, dolphins, and sea lions. My favorites were by far the giant pandas. They were so cute! (I wish that I could hug them 🙂 ).”

“So, today’s classes were lots of fun. First we had Polynomials with Po-Ru, where I got to brush up on interpolation. Then we did awesomely awesome constructions problems with Ian. Finally, in the afternoon, Carlos showed us some really cool angle-chasing problems. In fact, one of them is now my new favorite math problem!”

Congratulations to these exceptional young ladies! They’ve got math skillz, and they’ll go far.

MSRI 2010 Olympiad

[Source: San Jose Mercury News]

Posted in El Camino Real, high school, news, Palo Alto, people, sports, Stanford | 1 Comment »

One Hundred One

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Back in June my wife and I flew down to Los Angeles to attend the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. This is the annual event put on by the dynamic duo Heidi Durrow and Fanshen Cox, whom I wrote about back in April. The festival took place at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles. Little Tokyo is just one Metro light rail stop away from Olvera Street which commemorates the original site of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula.

CIMG1180Olvera Street isn’t literally the spot where Los Angeles was founded as a dusty little village in 1781 but it’s not far. It does contain the oldest remaining house in the city, the Avila Adobe. The city maintains Olvera Street as its historic district so it is bedecked with historical markers and the look and feel of old Mexico. It’s bustling with tourists, but across the street is a quiet little patch of grass, Father Serra Park.

It is a tribute to Junipero Serra of course and has a statue of El Padre Presidente holding a cross and a tiny mission. A few yards away is an El Camino Real bell. I had a vague recollection that there might be something special about this bell, and when we got home, I confirmed it. This is the first El Camino Real bell.

CIMG1182Sadly that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The first bell was placed by Mrs. A. S. C. Forbes on the other side of Olvera Street in front of the Plaza Church on August 15, 1906. That original bell hasn’t survived but a new bell was dedicated in the same location in 1998. To celebrate the centennial of that first bell, the Father Serra Park bell was erected on August 15, 2006. Read the L.A. Times’ story about the centennial celebration here on the web site of the California Bell Company which continues to forge the bells over a century later. I regret that we didn’t get over to the church to see the original bell site, but this centennial bell is very special in its own right.

As you can see from the photos, it was getting dark while we were in the park and we had to skedaddle before our light rail passes expired. The next day we took the $0.25 LA DOT DASH bus (“dot dash”…get it?) from our hotel in Chinatown back to Little Tokyo for the second day of the festival. I knew the shuttle was going to pass in front of the Junipero Serra statue so I held my camera phone up to the bus window to try to snap a picture in passing, just for fun. As we drove past this is the picture I got:
CIMG1186
It’s basically a picture of the sun through a gap in the trees. Somehow the sun, the Earth, me, my camera, Junipero Serra, and the centennial bell all lined up perfectly in the split second my finger released the shutter aboard a moving bus. It’s not much of a photo but it was a thrilling moment. Illumination can come when you least expect it.

Posted in El Camino Real, history, Los Angeles | 1 Comment »