Taiwan’s junior high and elementary school students shone in this year’s American Mathematics Competitions (AMC).
The Nine Nine Cultural and Educational Foundation, which oversees the AMC tests in Taiwan, said yesterday that of the 412 students worldwide who earned perfect scores in this year’s competitions for students up to and including the seventh grade, 124 were Taiwanese.
The AMC, established in the 1950s by the Mathematical Association of America, is one of a series of high school math competitions that help select competitors for the US team that competes each year at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
About 9,100 Taiwanese students elected to take this year’s test at the end of last month.
Students were required to solve 25 math problems, the majority of which were about geometry and probability.
The number of Taiwanese students with a perfect score hit a new high this year after 121 Taiwanese students received full scores in 2006, the foundation’s statistics showed.
A total of 962 students worldwide were able to solve 24 of the 25 questions. Taiwanese students accounted for 309 of them, tallies showed.
Among the 124 students with a perfect score this year, eight were elementary school students, although some of the questions on the test involved math taught in junior high school.
Lee Cheng-han (李政翰), a sixth grader from Tainan who obtained a perfect score, said he had enjoyed math since second grade.
“I feel happy when I’m doing math,” said Lee of Tainan’s Yungfu Primary School.
Lee said about half of the 25 questions were new to him, but that he had been able to solve them because he had learned how to analyze mathematical problems.
Lin Ching-wei (林靖為), another sixth grader who earned a perfect score, smiled when asked how he did it.
“I just love math,” he said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi