A total of 101 Michigan high school students, from 47 different schools, were honored for their achievement in the 49th Annual Michigan Mathematics Prize Competition at the Awards Day program held on Saturday, February 25 at Oakland University. This was the first year of the three-year term of Director Eddie Cheng (Oakland U).

Brian McCartin (Kettering U) spoke on “Mathematics of Music”, and Allen Schwenk (WMU) lectured on “A Plethora of Perplexingly Persistent Paradoxes”.

The first-place Gold Award winner and Ford Motor Company Scholar was Frederic Sala (Troy High School). The second-place Gold Award went to John Zhou (Detroit Country Day). The third-place Gold Award went to Dawson Zhou (Troy High School, Taipei American School). Silver Award winners at the first level were: Sunil Agarwal (Troy High School) and Alex Xu (Andover High School); at the second level, Vivek Behera (Detroit Country Day) and Alan Huang (Detroit Country Day); at the third-level, Juwon Lee (Ann Arbor Huron), Daniel Echlin (Luke M Powers) and Chaitanya Malla (Northville High School). In addition 41 Bronze Awards were given, and 50 students received Honorable Mention.

The top 51 students received $32,900 in scholarships in amounts ranging from $500 to $2,600. Thanks go to the corporate and other donors to the MMPC scholarship fund. The Honorable Mention winners received copies of the MAA publication Mathematical Diamonds, by Ross Honsberger. We would like to thank the MAA and the Michigan Council of Teachers of Mathematics for their generous donations that covered a portion of the cost of these books.

Part I of the MMPC is a 40-question multiple choice test, which this year was administered on October 5. The top 1,182 participants from Part I were invited to take Part II on December 7. There were 1,119 Part II participants.

The official Web site of the MMPC (www.math.oakland.edu/main/mmpc/index.html) contains information about the competition. Part I of the competition is given in the Fall of each year.