While the rest of Maine’s high school students slaved away in classrooms statewide, 900 young men and women, 10 of the finest students from virtually every high school in the state, computed and factored and extracted and tabulated and reasoned away at Maine’s biggest competition of this or any school year — the Maine State Math Meet.

Held April 8 this year on the convention floor of the new Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, much of the meet was taped for broadcast on Maine news programs statewide. The Maine meet, now in its 38th year, claims to be the second largest high school competition of any type (academic or athletic) held at one venue in the United States. It clearly is the biggest math test, one that requires 55 teachers proctoring, 50 teachers grading, 20 runners ferrying rounds of math questions around the room, and 20 people entering scores into the computerized scoring system.

The Boothbay Region Seahawk team completed its recovery from a weak start to the season after last year’s strong senior class departed. They bested 15 other high schools, and most of the schools with similar or smaller school populations. They did not exactly duplicate last year’s stellar season when they were the best public high school in their class statewide, but they moved back into the middle of the pack.

The high scorers for Boothbay Region this year include senior Robert Campbell and senior exchange student Zack Xue, followed by Lisa Pawlowski, Maya Schwehm, Angela Machon, Eben Goodwin, David Machon, Morgen Wilson, Gretchen Elder, Trystan Mercier, Molly Thibault and Sam Betts.

The overall winning teams at the meet were the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, Bangor High School, Thornton Academy and Chevrus High School. The top five individuals were Lucy Chen of Thornton, George Spahn of MSSM, Sophia Dai of Chevrus, Emmett Schell of Mountain View, and Kevin McDonough of MSSM. Boothbay’s Robert Campbell was honored to be the 51st best senior and the 106th best competitor at the event.

The seven-month math competition season came to an end with the state math meet. Boothbay’s students have been meeting after school since September preparing for the competitions. The high school math team is organized as a voluntary extra-curricular activity and team members need to commit the time necessary for practices or meets every week of the seven month season.

Coaches Peter and Nancy Gilchrist thank the team members for their efforts and participation throughout the year and give a special acknowledgment to Angela Machon, who emerged as the winner of a 40-minute long quick-response elimination competition with her teammates at the last practice of the year. Machon won a highly coveted wooden trophy, festooned with the number “1” drawn with a marker!

For those who would like to try their hand at a couple of typical questions from the state meet, here are two:

1. If telephone numbers are 7 digits long with a first digit greater than or equal to 1, how many ascending telephone numbers are possible? Define an ascending telephone number as one in which each digit after the first is greater than the preceding digit.
2. At the Maine State Math Meet, 16 identical souvenir pencils are to be divided among 10 different players on a team so that each player receives at least 1 pencil. How many different outcomes are possible? Any two outcomes are different if and only if at least one particular player receives a different number of pencils.

Approximately 40 percent of the high school competitors at the state meet got question one right and about 5 percent got question two right. The correct answers are 36 and 5005.