A few days ago, I got a valuable opportunity to be on my school’s Purple Comet Team! Purple Comet “is a free, annual, international, online, team, mathematics competition designed for middle and high school students that has been held every year since 2003” (https://purplecomet.org/). This year 3,752 teams from 75 countries registered for the competition, an incredible testament to the global love and importance for math.

Our team of six challenged ourselves in each problem with focus and determination and felt rewarded after solving them, sharing our ideas, and supporting one another. It wasn’t just about getting the right answers – it was about collaboration, critical-thinking, and bonding over our love of math. 

Personally, there was one aspect of the competition that could have been better; more girls on my school team and the competition. When I shared the list of team members with one of my math teachers, his first reaction was, “Oh! You’re the only girl.” It wasn’t because other girls weren’t capable of solving problems; however, the reason was more about the discouragement and self-doubt that prohibited them from competing. When I encouraged one of my math-loving friends to join, she frowned and said, “Mihika, I’m not good enough!” That was a sad moment for me as she is one of the smartest and talented people I know. 

One piece of advice I would give to all of the girls is that if I learned to believe in myself, everyone can do the same. Sometimes, I lack confidence and tell myself that I am not as knowledgeable or skilled, but I then remember that there are people who support me in everything I do, especially the math team. As I wrote in my earlier blog on Math + Girls = Fun, Dr. Cortinovis said, “If a math competition goes well, that’s great! If it doesn’t, who cares? So, participate because you have nothing to lose.”  

Also, team competitions are priceless ways to begin the math competition journey and gain experience because most members are uplifting, inspiring, and contributing to a positive team morale. So, take the first step. You are more than good enough.

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Sophie Germain was born on April 1, 1776 and later in her life, she became one of the most remarkable French mathematicians of all time. In her early life, Germain fought for her rights to education, enduring her parents’ opposition to learning and proving them wrong in the future. Even today, girls do not receive enough support and encouragement in mathematics and the majority of participants in math competitions are boys. From a Wall Street Journal article, published on January 5, 2025, Long the Star Pupils, Girls Are Losing Ground to Boys, the author wrote, “Boys now consistently outperform girls in math.” 

Germain helped narrow down the gender gap in her time by managing to find books and other resources about mathematics and other topics she was interested in. Over the course of her life, many people know her as the first woman to receive a prestigious award from the Paris Academy of Sciences’ on her work in the field of elasticity and for proving the Sophie Germain Theorem. However, the awards that Germain earned barely scratch the surface of all of her successes. 

She was also recognized for her work and inspiration from Carl Friedrich Gauss, a notable German mathematician, who worked together with number theory. Despite her talent, Germain had to disguise herself with the pseudonym of M. LeBlanc because a woman in mathematics was unacceptable by society at the time. Years later, she was the understudy of more famous mentors, such as Legendre, and developed her research in number theory and other mathematical topics. One of her quotes that inspired me was “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.”

Sophie Germain is truly a female mathematician to be motivated by, from struggling to study mathematics even though it was discouraged to becoming one of the most noteworthy mathematicians. Her story taught me to always push for my rights to education and not allow anyone to make me feel inferior to them through my deep passion for math as her. 

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Have you ever wondered how astronauts were sent to the moon and back safely? Katherine Johnson, a female mathematician, was born on August 26, 1918 in West Virginia, and her work influenced NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the discoveries of the universe. 

At a young age, Katherine’s love of math and number theory was apparent, despite her father being a lumberman and her mother as a school teacher. Katherine’s intelligence wound her up in high school at the age of ten! In West Virginia University, she was selected to be one of three African American students to take a graduate program in 1939. 

In 1953, she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), now NASA, as one of the few African American mathematicians to solve problems, analyze data, and were a key part of the successful missions to the moon. Interestingly, the women were known as “computers”. Her calculations of placing spacecrafts, such as Freedom 7, Friendship 7, and Apollo 11, into orbit which helped open doors for NASA’s future missions and findings from space.

In 1986, Katherine retired and became a public figure, encouraging girls to work hard and never give up. Additionally, in 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the 44th president of the United States at the time, Barack Obama. “In her 33 years at NASA, Katherine was a pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender, showing generations of young people that everyone can excel in math and science, and reach for the stars,” Obama said.

Katherine’s story inspires me to continue chasing my dreams, pushing through the gender gap and expanding the female math community.

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My school’s math team consisted of six students, two girls (including me) and four boys, to compete in the Caltech Math Meet (CMM). CMM is a math competition for high school students organized by the students of Caltech. We left school early to arrive at the San Francisco airport on time and headed to security first. It was the emptiest I have seen at an airport, so we had extra time on our hands to do homework and study for tests. After 1.5 hours, we boarded the plane, which flew us to LAX in forty minutes, the shortest flight of my life. From LAX, we drove one hour to the hotel, got dinner, and slept at 11:30 PM. At 5:30 in the morning, we woke up, showered, and walked to a breakfast place nearby. After packing our bags, we drove to Caltech and checked in. For the opening ceremony at 8:30 AM, we sat in the Ramo Auditorium for instructions on the individual and team rounds later that day. We headed over to Baxter for the ninety-minute individual round. The problems challenged me, but I felt accomplished afterward for solving many of them correctly! 

Outside of the Ramo Auditorium, the competition staff of Caltech provided lunch for all the teams. It was wonderful to see hundreds of other math lovers on a green lawn together, frantically discussing the problems from the first test. Additionally, I finally met the hardworking former president of Athemath, Vivian Loh, in person. As a member of the Athemath community, I would describe the organization as a brilliant way to draw together ambitious girls, the marginalized gender in mathematics.

As a team, we walked around the beautiful campus and headed to the next round, the proof-based team contest in Hameetman. There were many teams in the room, and I loved looking up to the way other members of my team brought unique insights to problem-solving. Even though we could not solve all of them in the allotted one hour, we tried our best to solve most of them.

After the team round (the last exam), we tried to reschedule our flight earlier, so we unfortunately did not stay for the awards ceremony. We also did not arrive at the airport in time; therefore, we decided to go to Sofi Stadium for team bonding and reward for the intense competition. After taking pictures of the stadium and Rivers Lake, we went to the airport for our flight. 

Overall, the experience was memorable, worthy, and rewarding. Spending time making new friendships and memories through a shared passion, gaining more math competition experience, and lots of laughs was what my two-day trip was all about.

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Many popular questions I have frequently heard are “What is math even used for?” or “Will I ever use math in my everyday life?” Naturally, it is difficult to imagine how the infinite number of proofs/theorems in geometry and the linear equations in algebra are used daily, especially outside of the classroom.

Shopping and money management are the most common, math-heavy tasks. The skill of budgeting, counting change, discounts, sales taxes, and overall costs of items being purchased completely involves math. Although it may sound like a simple addition and subtraction activity, mathematics appears in all aspects of our lives.

Simply splitting a slice of cake with a sibling involves math too! Even though we might not realize it, trying to ensure that the cake is cut precisely in half uses math.

Sports, a physical activity many people are passionate about, involve more complex mathematics. From a team player to a cheering fan in the crowd, math calculates the probabilities of winning, strategizing, and scoring. Geometry, the study of shapes, angles, and lines, directly influences the efficiency of a sports game, from the time-effective way a softball player runs the bases to a golfer’s swing mechanics and ball trajectory. Many people also engage in other healthy activities like walking in the park or weightlifting to get stronger. Calculating the number of reps, laps, minutes, and weight measurements also utilizes math.

Event planning is an enjoyable and math-requiring task. A seemingly straightforward plan for a birthday party involves the difficulty of deciding the number of guests, probability of guests accepting the invite, the amount of food per guest, location and space utilization, and budgeting the cost of supplies for the event. 

More examples include managing time to guarantee a productive Saturday, measuring salt to add to a bowl of soup, watering roses in a garden, planning a week-long trip to Italy, playing music, and starting a business. The list could go on forever! Mathematics appears in many forms, making crucial decisions to ensure success in our everyday lives.

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I was given the opportunity to experience the Berkeley Math Tournament (BMT) which turned out to be one of the most inspiring and extraordinary experiences in my math journey so far. BMT is a UC Berkeley student-led organization that has a mission to spread the love of math and entertain students with world-applicable problems to solve. As part of my high school’s math team, this was my first BMT competition ever. There were six members in my team across 9th, 10th and 11th grades. My school had two teams at BMT, and some other schools had six to eight teams. 

On a foggy and slightly windy morning on Saturday (11/2/2024), I arrived at 8AM to the spectacular campus of UC Berkeley. I surprisingly found my way into the Dwinelle Hall area but because the competition is popular, over 1,000 students across 203 teams were also scrambling to find their teammates and schedules. After fifteen minutes of texting anxiously to multiple teammates, I united with the five other students from my school team. After our confusions about registration were resolved, we headed over to the Pauley Ballroom for the first round, the Power Round. As a proof-based team-round for ninety minutes, there was a great amount of variety in the questions for everyone’s strengths to be put to use. I was also inspired by the problem-solving strategies that varied throughout the team. 

Afterwards, I immediately went to a different location for my two, individual focus tests of algebra and geometry. I nervously walked into Room 145 of Dwinelle Hall as the fifty students inside stared at me the moment I stepped in. I sat down next to a girl who met me with friendly looks and the most relatable thoughts about the tests we were taking. Both focus tests were exciting, and I felt proud of myself after solving some of the challenging problems. During the break between the focus tests, I talked to some of the other students near me, which taught me that math competitions are not only to accurately solve all of the problems, but also to engage in meaningful conversations with new people, especially those who share common interests in math.

After happily completing both focus tests even though they started later than intended, I ran over to the restaurant where the rest of my teammates were having lunch. Once I reached the restaurant, my teammates and I talked about our strategies for the next round that we practiced for the day before. We lost track of time but rushed back to the Pauley Ballroom to make it just in the nick of time. However, there was no need to eat and speed-walk at the same time because the round started one hour later than it was supposed to! During the delay, I noticed one of the most memorable and noteworthy moments of the entire experience: together, in one room, young mathematicians similar to me shared the same love for math as I did. The Guts round, a 75-minute team round with nine sets of three problems began. My team and I quickly but thoughtfully solved the first few sets of problems as the difficulty increased faster than I expected. In the end, I was told that we did better than the math team last year which was a fulfilling statement. Overall, the eventful day was a worthy experience, and I can’t wait for the next BMT competition and many other math events to come. 

-Mihika

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I got one of the most valuable opportunities to form a math club at my middle school to encourage and motivate girls to explore STEM and participate in math competitions. To do this, I invited four female mathematicians from Stanford and UC Berkeley as guest speakers to share words of advice and life lessons from their careers and how they got interested in math being female.

The speakers who taught so much about math from a different perspective were:

Dr. Eugenia Malinnikova: a mathematics professor at Stanford University. Dr. Malinnikova went to Princeton prior to becoming a professor where she was a von Neumann fellow during 2018-2019. She also won the Clay Research Award in 2017. Dr. Malinnikova earned her Ph.D. in 1999 from St. Petersburg State University. She researches harmonic analysis, elliptic PDE, and potential theory. 

Dr. Alice Cortinovis: a tenure-track researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, Italy. Dr. Cortinovis received a Ph.D. from EPFL, Switzerland. She primarily does research on numerical linear algebra.

Dr. Catherine Cannizzo: a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley. Dr. Cannizzo received a Ph.D. in 2019 from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s and master’s in mathematics from the University of Oxford. She does research in the field of geometry.

Dr. Krutika Tawri: a professor of math at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on deterministic and stochastic nonlinear Partial Differential Equations arising from fluid dynamics, geophysics, and material science. Dr. Tawri received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Indiana University.

All four amazing professors taught me the most priceless life lessons I want to share.  

Dr. Malinnikova wisely stated, “There are very many different ways to enjoy mathematics.” I learned that mathematics can be enjoyed through competitions, making origami figures, pushing oneself to solve problems for fun, etc. She also explained, “There is so much development in the world in science, technology, and mathematics because we all think differently. We need people with different minds, backgrounds, and experiences to be successful.” This quote made me wonder if we all thought/acted/experienced everything the same, what would the world be like? Certainly not the thriving societies we live in today. 

Dr. Cortinovis also taught me a valuable lesson, “If a math competition goes well, that’s great! If it doesn’t, who cares? So, participate because you have nothing to lose.” I have never forgotten her quote because it applies to everyday life, such as school, work, and sports. I learned that if someone continues trying and never gives up, good results will follow. The effort counts more than the number of questions correctly answered. 

“I actually met a lot of interesting people from math competitions. Like… I met my best friend,” Dr. Cortinovis explained. At this point, I felt that mathematics has it all: finding loved ones, sharing interests, and having lots of fun. 

Dr. Tawri talked about the gender gap in mathematics, saying, “Math is about problem-solving and logical reasoning. It sees no gender, it sees no race. And that’s why I think it’s also extremely important to encourage young female mathematicians to join the community.” It just goes to show that although gender and race gaps may be discouraging, math is for everyone. 

“Show the girls that math is not boring; it’s really fun. No matter what field you are in, you are going to end up using math in one form or the other,” Dr. Tawri explained. I learned that math may be portrayed as “tedious” or extremely frustrating but if you give it a chance, it can become one’s favorite hobby and part of life like it is for me.

“The field is really formed by the people doing it. And the more girls and gender-expansive youth doing math, the better the field becomes.” Dr. Cannizzo stated one of the most real facts is that the math field needs more diversity and the mathematicians are the ones who show the world what math can do.

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I was able to attend briefly the Data Science Summit at Stanford organized by Dr. Boaler and Steven Levitt. Mr. Levitt makes a point in this article that “A mathematical way of thinking, numeracy, data literacy, is far more important today than it has been; the ability to visualize data, the ability to make sense out of a pile of numbers, has never been more important, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at the math curriculum.” His key point is that should the way we teach mathematics in school be centralized around data and computing.

There is a strong emphasis on calculus in most schools including two AP tests which test one’s competency in calculus. Calculus progress determines which students are the most advanced in mathematics in high schools and it has been like that for a very long time now. I believe that calculus foundational skills are absolutely necessary for many physical and social sciences besides college mathematics. However, given where we are as a society and how much digital data is generated every day, I agree that statistics/data science should be emphasized in the high schools and offered as a choice. I personally see this in addition to calculus and not in lieu of. Let’s see how the rollout of  Introduction to Data Science course that was co-developed by UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District is received. Also, we as a society will need to figure out how to train teachers around the country to be able to teach such courses.

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I have been always impressed by the research of Dr. Cimpian on gender equality in STEM and the insights he has provided over the past few years. “Dr. Cimpian’s research focuses on the use and development of novel and rigorous methods to study equity and policy, particularly concerning language minorities, women, and sexual minorities,” as per the NYU website.

There are a few STEM majors where the female-to-male ratios are well balanced but in Physics, Enggineering, and Computer Science (PECS) including Pure Mathematics, most colleges report a lot more men (4x to 5x) as compared to women. As per the recent research that got published in Science, NYU researchers found that the ratios are not imbalanced because men are performing better in STEM subjects in high school or related standardized test scores. However, the researchers found that “men with very low high-school GPAs in math and science and very low SAT math scores were choosing these math-intensive majors just as often as women with much higher math and science achievement.”

This is really surprising to me and something I would have not believed. I know there are potentially many reasons why women are not choosing these majors which could be related to their sense of belonging and inclusion in these fields. This study suggest that “interventions to close the gender gap may work to attract high-achieving women; yet, something beyond these student factors may be attracting low-achieving men and repelling average- and low-achieving women, and without addressing those factors, it is unlikely that the PECS gender gap will fully close.”

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It is so encouraging and rewarding to see all the amazing girls recognized across all of the MAA 29 sections. Jessica Wan who is in the 8th grade at Saint John’s School in Puerto Rico will win $5000 for her perfect score. Congratulations to everyone! MAA did a nice job of notifying everyone and I also saw some schools recognizing the award winners via their local publications. It is nice to see so many middle school girls winning the award as well.

The award winners’ names on one page and the announcement from MAA is here.

Reminder of Maryam Mirzakhani AMC 10A Prize and Awards qualifications:

Mathematical Association of America (MAA) received support from Awesome Math Girls, an organization dedicated to making mathematics and problem solving more appealing to girls in middle and high school levels. The funds will support a prize and awards, honoring the top-performing female students on the MAA American Mathematics Competition (AMC) 10A. This year’s top-scoring U.S. female from AMC 10A will receive the Maryam Mirzakhani AMC 10A Prize of $5,000. Additionally, the five top-scoring AMC 10 A U.S. females from each of the 29 MAA Sections will receive Maryam Mirzakhani AMC 10 certificates in honor of their performance on the AMC 10A. The Maryam Mirzakhani AMC 10A Prize of $5,000 will be presented to a student at the yearly Mathematical Olympiad Awards Ceremony in June.

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