Three Buchholz students, one Eastside student named as national Math Olympiad qualifiers

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

Based on their performance on a series of tests administered by the Mathematical Association of America, three Buchholz students and one Eastside student have qualified as United States of America Math Olympiads (USAMO), and two more Buchholz students have qualified as United States of America Junior Math Olympiads. Qualifying as an Olympiad is the highest honor a K-12 student can achieve in math without making the five-person International Olympiad team for the United States.

There are a total of 328 USAMO qualifiers this year in the entire country, with 11 qualifiers from Florida – and four of those 11 are from Alachua County. Buchholz’s three qualifiers are the most of any school in Florida; in fact, no other school in Florida has more than one qualifier.

There are seven Junior Math Olympiads in the state of Florida this year (out of 300 in the U.S.), and two of them are from Buchholz.

Alachua County’s qualifiers:

• Jake Frazer (Buchholz-12th grade)
• Samuel Kim (Buchholz-12th grade)
• Andrew Xing (Buchholz-9th grade)
• Atharva Pathak (Eastside-12th grade)

Alachua County’s Junior qualifiers:

• Will Guan (Buchholz-10th grade)
• Daniel Wang (Buchholz-10th grade)

Jake Frazer qualified for the fifth time, a record for Alachua County; the next highest qualified three times. Only six seniors in the United States have been USAMOs the past five years.

The students qualified through a two-day test; each day, they had 4.5 hours to solve three problems.