WHS math team wins third straight state championship

The Wayzata High School math team won its fourth straight state championship tier I title on March 14 at the 26th Minnesota Mathematics League State Tournament at South Saint Paul High School.

This is the seventh time in the last nine years the WHS math team has won the state title. The WHS math team competed in the Southwest Suburban division and finished the season with 597 points – the top score in the state. 

The WHS math team finished the state tournament with a score of 117 points which put them in first place. WHS seniors Rohit Agrawal, Gaurav Singh and sophomore Abram Sanderson were the top scorers at the state meet. Agrawal has had perfect season records (70 points – i.e., all 40 questions correct) for the past three years, and Singh the past two years.  Last year, Agrawal was the first student ever to have a perfect season score and a perfect tournament score in the same season.  Also, in the 27 year history of the state math league in its current form, only four students have won the season scoring title multiple times including Agrawal and Singh, and only 12 students have had perfect seasons including Agrawal and Singh.

This year’s state tournament participants were: seniors Agrawal, Kelly Chen, Larry Lee, Singh and Brian Tu; juniors Duligur Ibeling and Sahiba Singh; sophomores Miri Choi, Jacob Kautzky, Abram Sanderson and Roy Zhao; and freshmen Priyanka Narayan, Apekshya Panda and William Zeng.

The team is coached by head coach Thomas Kilkelly and assistant coach William Skerbitz.

In addition to the win at the state tournament, the team also placed third out of 181 teams across the nation on the Mandelbrot team competition. This is a contest in which groups of four students work together on a series of proof-style questions. The students write out their explanations to the successive parts, which build upon one another to develop a mathematical result. The team play lasts one hour and student responses are mailed to a panel of graders for evaluations.

The team also tied for second place internationally on the American Regional Mathematics League (ARML) Power Contest. The team scored well with 136 points on the year’s ARML local competition. WHS had 14 students score high enough on the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) to participate in the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). Of those 14 students, Agrawal and Singh qualified for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) tam, while Sanderson qualified for the Junior USAMO.