On Saturday, January 31, the Princeton High School Math team held the first Princeton Math Tournament (PMT). Consisting of two divisions, the tournament drew over 450 participants from elementary and middle schools across New Jersey.
Led by tournament co-directors Maiya Qiu ’27 and Emma Li ’26, the PHS math team began preparation for the tournament in the summer. Though the event was originally scheduled for October, it was postponed until the new year due to scheduling conflicts with other major math competitions earlier in the year.
One of the most crucial parts of the preparation was problem-writing, with volunteers consisting of PHS students, middle schoolers, and Princeton University students. The team wrote over 500 problems, though only around 100 were used for the actual tournament.
During the tournament, participants were split into two divisions — one for grades 6–8, and the other for grades 3–5. In teams of 1–3, students competed in four rounds: a sprint round, a target round, a puzzle round, and a team round. Near the end, PMT also organized an Estimathon, a competition based around estimating results to complicated questions, such as: What is the area in square miles of the smallest non-self-intersecting hexagon that encompasses all Ivy League schools except for Cornell and Dartmouth?
“The idea [with this tournament] was [that] we wanted to create more opportunities for students in the New Jersey area, to become more interested in math … work with other students, and work with math outside of school or outside of the classroom, and maybe introduce some interesting puzzles and ideas,” said Li.
In addition to the various puzzles, PMT also invited guest speaker Professor Dieter Kotschick from the Institute of Advanced Studies to speak with parents of participating students. Inspired by the German children’s book “The Number Devil,” Kotschick’s talk focused on the value in finding joy and fun in math, which he believed was especially important for young kids participating in the tournament.
“I wanted to … emphasize to the parents that it’s very important that kids have fun and enjoy mathematics,” said Kotschick. “They’re not just sequences of numbers. There’s a kind of natural beauty in mathematical concepts.”
At the end of the tournament, prizes were awarded to the best-performing students and teams, with the highest reward being $200 for the individual winner of each division, as well as trophies and plushies for teams that placed in the top three.
“The competition was really fun … the [problems] were pretty similar to what you’d see in other national competitions,” said first-place winner Aarush Moola, an eight-grader at Community Middle School. “I think it was a really challenging but rewarding experience at the same time.”
Help from sponsors provided much of the financial support needed for the tournament. A key sponsor was the Princeton Regional Education Association (PREA), represented by Malachi Wood, a French teacher at PHS. He assisted the Princeton Math Team in securing a grant of $1,000 from PREA for food and awards. Wood emphasized the importance of showcasing how PMT helped build the community in order to receive support from PREA.
Wood also stressed that teachers played a supporting role during the PMT, as the general operations were student-led.
“The day of the tournament, [I saw] the students registering people, organizing things, preparing things … Inside the auditorium, they were organizing the students and asking them math questions,” said Wood.
In addition to handling operations on the day of the tournament and prior preparation, student organizers also heavily focused on outreach through a variety of media in an attempt to get middle school students and teams to sign up for the tournament. While social media outreach helped spread the word about the tournament, cooperation with administrators from participating middle schools played the biggest role in gaining sign-ups.
“We had more than 480 sign-ups, and then around 450 of them came. So it was actually an extremely high turnout rate of around 90 percent,” said Qiu. “We actually did not expect this many students to show up.”
After the tournament concluded, the PHS math team received both constructive and positive feedback from participants. The parent of contestant Mario Luo, a fifth grader at Johnson Park Elementary School, was one of the many parents that thanked the PHS Math Team for their organization after PMT concluded.
“My son had a wonderful time and came home truly excited about the experience,” said the parent in an email to the math team. “I really appreciate all the time and effort you and your team put into this event. It [was] honestly one of the most exciting activities in the Princeton community.”
Due to the success of this year’s tournament, the math team has high hopes for PMT’s future. They plan to continue hosting it in upcoming years, next time more prepared for the large turnout.
“I was impressed by how successful it was. I think they were expecting 300 kids or so, but they got 400 … and everything was well run and organized, from what I could see,” said Wood. “There were some difficulties in running out of supplies and so forth … [but] they were really successful.”