On Sunday, May 8, Deerfield Academy hosted the sixth annual Deerfield Math Competition (DMC)–organized by Deerfield students and participated in by middle school students. After the opening ceremony in the Garonzik, teams participated in a round where the theme of questions relate to Sherlock Holmes, followed by an individual relay round, a lunch break, then the team general and guts rounds.
The individual round had eight problems, with all problems weighted equally The event concluded in the afternoon with an award ceremony where a team from Eaglebrook were announced as the competition’s victor.
There were three main branches for organizing the competition: problem writing, logistics, and outreach. The problem writing branch wrote all problems used in the competition; the logistics branch organized the event, reserving the Garonzik and other rooms in Koch; and outreach, mainly Jerry Yuan ’22 and Summer Zhou ’23, the two leaders of the Deerfield Math Club, corresponded with participating schools to arrange the event.
Questions in DMC were designed to be thoughtprovoking but not necessarily require mathematical knowledge beyond precalculus. Although the original guidelines required the difficulty to range from American Math Contest 10 (AMC 10) to the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), the organizers composed a new set of easier questions as the date of the event approached. As Deerfield Math Club member Daniel Wareham ’24 commented “[The competition] is something enjoyable rather than making the questions too hard that [middle schoolers] cannot do [them].”
This year, the DMC had slightly fewer participants due to some schools’ strict COVID-19 protocols. Some of the schools indicated a desire to be separate from other teams. Therefore, the DMC arranged separate rooms for these teams during the team rounds.
Although the format of DMC was largely inspired by large university competitions including the MIT and Harvard Math Competition and the Princeton Math Tournament, DMC has fewer participants, therefore, has a more intimate setting. Especially during the team guts round, in which participants could see everyone’s score updated immediately, seeing the scores created a competitive atmosphere for all participants. Zhou said that in some large competitions, “if you are not in the top several teams, then you can’t really see the score and feel as if you are just a part of it, and can’t really feel your presence. But that is a good thing about competing in a small setting.” Similarly, Wareham, who has only competed in the online Harvard and MIT Math Competition, said that online competitions “are nowhere near the atmosphere of a live competition.”