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Talent Search Honors Day

This past year was the 38th This past year was the 38th anniversary of our statewide, high school Mathematics Talent Search. This program, which began in 1963, is supported by the College of Engineering, Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, the Cray Research Foundation, and the Van Vleck estate. The annual Honors Day was held on May 9, 2002. Seventeen students were honored for their achievement on the Talent Search Problems. Four of the students were from Madison West High School; three of the students were from Madison Memorial High School. Two of the students were sons of Michael Wage [PhD 1976, M. Rudin]. The $24,000 Van Vleck Scholarships to attend UW-Madison this year went to Jesse Beder of Shorewood High School and Po-Ling Loh of Madison Memorial High School.

As usual there was a stimulating program for these talented students. Professor Ken Ono gave a talk on ``Points on Curves'' while Dr. Sanjay Limaye gave a presentation on ``Quest for Life on Mars.'' After lunch and the presentations, the students, their parents, and their teachers were given a tour of the Space Sciences & Engineering Building.

Present at the festivities was Qi Su, who graduated this past summer in the Computer Engineering Program of the College of Engineering. Qi Su is the first Van Vleck scholarship winner graduate. He is now a graduate student at Stanford University having won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

As usual the creative problem makers were Marty Isaacs and Don Passman. Three of the problems from this year's collection are:

  1. For any positive integer n, let S(n) denote the sum of its digits. Show that the equation n + S(n) = 1,000,000 has no solution. Then solve the equation for n + S(n) = 1,000,000,000.
  2. Let x and y be nonzero real numbers satisfying the equation

    x+ 6/x = 2y + 3/y

    if x/y is not equal to 2 find the product xy
  3. (New Year's Problem) Find the number of nonnegative integers n such that 2003 + n is a multiple of n + 1.

l. to r.: Daniel Kane, Andy Bodoh, Kristina Simmons, Ryan Schloesser,
Matt Wage, Don Passman, Po-Ling Loh, ILya Gurevic, Jia Luo, Jason Ko