by Christina Tran

As the Chamblee math team wraps up another year of competitions, math students throughout the school have sighs of relief. No more early morning practices or getting up early Saturday mornings to go to tournaments. 

Practice makes perfect, though, and Chamblee’s math team is no exception. It has a record of consistently doing well at competitions. Throughout the state and even in the Southeast, Chamblee is known for its superb showings at tournaments. This year, the math team participated in about twenty competitions and placed first or second in all of them, including the Cobb County Invitational, Furman University, Paideia, monthly Georgia Math League and five Greater Atlanta Mathematics Examinations (GAME) competitions. Matthew Espy, who will be graduating this year, has won 1st place at the Furman University tournament, which includes top students from all over the Southeast, for the past three years. He also received a first-place trophy for the oral competition at GAME and was one of only three students in Georgia who took the U.S. American Mathematics Examination. Anthony Ritz, also a senior, placed 1st at a competition held at Georgia Tech, which included chemistry and physics along with math. He also earned the top score at Chamblee on the American High School Mathematics Examination (AHSME). Chamblee also had 14 other students scoring 100 or higher on the AHSME, which earned them invitations to take the American Invitational Mathematics Examinations (AIME). This is a great accomplishment, since most schools only have 1 or 2 students participating. On April 24th, Matthew and Anthony, along with Matthew Toups and Adi Sunderam, represented Chamblee at the State math tournament. They captured 1st place in the state, which is the first time this has happened for a DeKalb County school. All four members of the team were also selected to be on the 30-member ARMEL team which will represent the Southeast at the national tournament in Pennsylvania, which is an incredible honor. 

“It takes a lot of commitment and dedication to be on the math team, and often our students go directly to athletic practices or other activities after competitions,” Dr. Hunt says of the students. Although this is true, the students could not do it without the support of Chamblee math teachers, especially Ms. Russack, Ms. Binion, Ms. Hagan, and Dr. Hunt, who holds morning math practices in her classroom twice a week. They are the math team coordinators and often sacrifice their afternoons and Saturdays to accompany their students to tournaments. All of their hard work, teachers and students, has paid off. “We are so proud to be a part of a math team that is well-respected across the state,” says Ms. Binion.