Teen Mathematics Contest Turns 35

Westmont’s 35th annual Mathematics Field Day features students from nine regional high schools in a friendly competition Saturday, Feb. 10, in Winter Hall at 1 pm. Alphan Altinok, a senior data scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, will speak about “Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence” at the awards banquet at 5:30 pm in the Global Leadership Center. 

The event, directed by Westmont mathematics professor Anna Aboud, features student teams from Carpinteria, Cate, Dos Pueblos, La Canada, Laguna Blanca, Oaks Christian School, San Marcos, Santa Barbara and Thacher high schools. 

The event includes college bowls with buzzers, written exams, and Chalk Talks with student presentations. This year the Chalk Talk, a 10-12-minute presentation, is about figurate numbers, which are numbers that can be represented by a regular geometrical arrangement of equally spaced points.