Freshmen Peter Petev, Mary Steurer and eighth grader Haran Kumar received the top scores on the Continental Math League exams.

“It was pretty easy. Most of the material is familiar, and the problem solving processes weren’t that difficult,” Kumar said.

The CML exposes Geometry students to new types of math problems and their first math contest.

“The beauty of the contests are they are no pressure, although students can win awards for doing it. It practices skills that the students should already know and applies them to new problems and situations that the students may not have experienced previously,” Geometry A teacher Patrick Mooney said.

Two hundred Geometry students take the CML Euclid contests, and 50 students in Honors Geometry take the CML Pythagoras contests. The Math Department used the contests to help the students learn and apply what they have learned.

“I like math, and I think problem solving is a good skill to learn. Math is a useful subject. It will come in useful later in life,” Steurer said.

The Math Department believes results show that the students who do participate in the contest often do well in their math classroom.

“They have been easy because I have been working on math for a long time. Math is my strongest subject,” Petev said.

Kumar, Petev and Steurer will attend the Math Honors Society (Mu Alpha Theta) and Science Honors Society (Beta Chi Pi) ceremony on April 23 to receive their awards.

“Mu Alpha Theta and Beta Chi Pi are two groups that celebrate student academic contributions to each other,” Mooney said.

This is the first year that the Math Honors Society and the Science Honors Society have both participated in the ceremony.

“We generally have an interesting math speaker, introduce members, induct new members, celebrate contest award winners and hand out honor cords,” Mooney said.  “The honor ceremony will celebrate the successes of students academically in the fields of math and science.”