Seahawk Math Team Seahawk Math Team wins top award. BRHS math team members hold the trophies they won at the Central Maine Math League meet held at Gardiner High School March 12. (Photo Peter Gilchrist)

It was all divide and conquer for the Boothbay Region High School Seahawk math team on Wednesday, March 12, as they reduced their competition to fractional remainders and extended their multiple first place win streak to five in the small school division of the Central Maine Math League (CMML).

Ever since the 2003-2004 season, the conference championship traveling trophy has found a home in Mr. Ed Tostevin's room in the mathematics department at BRHS, where it will now reside for another year.

Seven high schools of similar size -- Boothbay Region, Wiscasset, Mt. Abram, Georges Valley, Carrabec, Monmouth and Winthrop -- comprise the small school division. Conference competitions occur once a month beginning in October and culminate in the final regular season meet, which was held this year at Gardiner High School.

Boothbay entered the final match with a tenuous hold on first place. Georges Valley High School trailed by a few points and Mt. Abram and Wiscasset were breathing down everyone's neck. But the Boothbay team buckled down at the championship meet and achieved superior scores. The final season-long tallies for the top four teams were Boothbay Region -- 427, Georges Valley -- 348, Wiscasset -- 329, and Mt. Abram -- 313.

Erskine Academy of South China was the large school champ and Lincoln Academy of Newcastle was the medium school champ.

The CMML consists of 23 high schools and about 20 percent of the school population in the state of Maine. It is one of five leagues, all of which are grouped until the umbrella organization, the Maine Association of Math Leagues (MAML). Competitions are held simultaneously on each of the five meet dates statewide and scores are tabulated by school and by individual. They are available to the general public on the MAML Web site, http://maml.net . Click on the links to view the Central Maine school and individual scores, photographs, and sample problems.

In addition to school competitions, the CMML presents awards to the top scoring individuals, conference-wide. Boothbay's Wyatt Colby won a trophy for being the eighth best sophomore among the over 2000 at all 23 of the league schools. Colby was also the top-scoring individual on the Boothbay Region team for the full season. Freshman Maya DeGroote was the ninth highest scoring freshman among all the high schools in the league, and thirteen other Boothbay Region students placed within the top fifty in their respective classes, a distinction that rates them in the highest 2.5 percent of their peer groups.

Now that the regular math league season has reached a successful conclusion, the Boothbay Region team will prepare for the Mid-Maine Invitational math meet at Erskine Academy on March 26 and the Maine State Math Meet at the Cumberland County Civic Center on April 15. Team practices are held after school and involve preparing the students to use what they have learned in the classroom successfully in a competitive, meet environment. The topics covered are drawn from the key 25 subjects of high school math and they range from arithmetic and statistics to conics and probability. The format of actual meet questions varies from individual fill-in answers to cooperative team questions to relay rounds in which several team members coordinate in answering five different questions to ascertain a composite result.

Questions at the final meet of the regular '07-'08 season varied from the easy: Find the equation of the set of all points that are exactly 5 units from the origin in an xy-coordinate plane ; To the quite difficult: A circle with radius 1 meter is di s played on a large plasma screen. At time t=0 seconds, a dot appears on the circle and moves clockwise around the circle at A meters per second. Also at time t=0 seconds, a second dot appears on the opp o site side of the circle. The second dot also moves cloc k wise, but at B meters per second. Find the least value of t > 0 when the two dots are exactly 1 meter straight-line distance apart.

For answers -- ask a math team member!

The Boothbay Region team is coached by Peter and Nancy Gilchrist, who express their thanks to the students for their efforts, the school faculty for all the training, the administration and community for all the support, and the parents for all the rides and for producing such a fine group of young women and men. Twenty-two students achieved points for the school during the course of the 2007-2008 regular season. In addition to Wyatt Colby and Maya DeGroote, they include seniors Julie Higgins, Jazel Pinkham, Max Weiss, Devin Mellor, and Joe Farrin; juniors Erinn Chipman and Thai exchange-student Aum Santikunaporn; sophomores Benjamin Gottlieb, Danielle Lorrain, Cody Barry, Drew Schmid, Aleksandra Smith, Tiffany Tsang, Joe Morgan, and Kelsea Miller; and freshmen Emma McIlwain, Nate Schwehm, Sari Weiss, Kristin Sibley, and Meryl Jones.