Katie Mierau
This article appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on April 5, 1998.By KATHERINE GAZELLA
NORTHDALE -- Restless and heavily caffeinated, the students look as if they're ready to bolt off the bus and sprint around the high school.
Lots of that physical energy will have to go to waste -- they won't do much running at a math contest.
As the bus bounces into Cape Coral, George Vilches, a member of the Gaither High School math team, programs a graphing calculator while a second calculator rests on his knee. He is the calculator guru of the team and never goes anywhere with just one.
He anxiously looks back and forth between the mini-computer and the front window of the bus as he prepares for the competition. In 20 minutes, he will be hunched over a Scantron sheet, solving a differential equation and simplifying Riemann sums.
"There's a lot that kids who don't do this are missing out on," he says.
While their classmates head to Clearwater Beach or sit mesmerized in front of MTV, Vilches and his teammates spend their Saturday evaluating integrals and finding the volume of cylinders.
They live for days like this.
"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," a team member says as the bus pulls into the parking lot.
The members of the Gaither squad, one of the best teams in the nation, have mastered something that otherwise intelligent people have no hope of even understanding. These are elite mental athletes, the Carl Lewises of the logarithm, the Steffi Grafs of the convergence interval. They are so nimble-minded they can find flaws on tests prepared by college professors.
When math team members speak, it's often hard to break the code. An "83" is a calculator, a multiple-choice exam with lots of "E" answers is a bad test, "f of x" is part of the everyday vocabulary.
But here's something that will make sense to anyone who likes a good battle.
They are on their way to a competition, and they won't be happy unless they win.
At 6 a.m. on a Saturday, the teenagers shuffle onto the bus with their headphones, graphing calculators and some wild cases of bed-head.
They will compete against 25 teams at the regional competition, and they expect to do well. But they are limping a bit at this contest: Two members of the pre-calculus team are taking the SAT, and a calculus student is visiting a college.
At the school, good news greets them: Hillsborough High School, one of Gaither's rivals, won't be at Cape Coral.
"Yes!" pre-calculus team member Stephen Hicks says.
The Gaither team does not win every competition, but team members have grown accustomed to doing well.
Last year, they finished third in Florida, one of the most competitive states in the country. Last summer, they competed against schools from around the country at a national meeting of the minds. They finished fourth.
"Fourth in the whole country," says Susan Hammer, still in disbelief. "If that had been the football team, they probably would've had a school holiday."
The Algebra II team finished second -- not second in Hillsborough County, not second in the state, not second in the southeastern United States. Second in the nation.
They're still mad about it.
"We should've been first," Hicks says. That remark prompts a noisy, disgusted conversation that the teammates have had many times before.
The judges didn't give them points for a particular problem, they say. The answer on the answer key was wrong. The right answer had to be three-fourths.
But there's little time to dwell on last year's result. This is game day, and the team must face a new set of cosine graphs and y-axes.
Before it is finished, one team member will win his first individual trophy, a student will prove the answer key is wrong, and a senior on the team will reach the end of an era.
Katie Mierau
Katie Mierau knows she's different from her peers. Most of them, she says, go to tests guzzling coffee to stay awake and complaining they're unprepared.Mierau has fun.
"I'm weird that way," the Gaither senior says.
The way she sees it, tests give her a chance to challenge and prove how much she knows. At the math competitions, she has proven that she knows a lot -- and she has the awards to show it.
By integrating and graphing and square-rooting, she has won more trophies than even a whiz like her can keep track of.
Jennifer Falor, another calculus team member, teases Mierau about her trophies.
"Your whole house is like 'Shrine to Katie,'" Falor says.
Mierau is president of Gaither's Mu Alpha Theta chapter (the official name of the math team), an officer in three other clubs and an Irish dancer.
On an application for a college scholarship, Mierau had to list the awards she has won. She discovered she had an enviable problem: "I couldn't remember them all."
The Cape Coral competition is the last of its kind for Mierau, who has competed in math contests since seventh grade. Most contests are invitationals or regional competitions, which they go to every few weeks. The only remaining contests in her math team career are the state and national meets.
"I'm really going to miss it, more than anything else I do," she says.
To outsiders, the appeal of math competition is difficult to understand. But for those who love the contests, there is no greater happiness.
"I went to a conference where, for seven days, I just did math problems. If I could design heaven for me, that's what it would be," geometry coach Pat Todd says. "It's the same way with these kids."
But how can anybody think math competitions are heavenly?
Watch the math team for a few hours, and the answer is apparent: They can demonstrate that they are among the best at what they do. They can outsmart adults. And they can form a community with other people who speak their language.
When the team members discuss integers and centroids, they speak with the joy of native Greek speakers who find each other in a room crowded with Americans. They appear to be saying, "Finally someone understands me."
They also love the challenge.
They joke about all the standardized tests they take throughout high school, which rely more on memorization than thinking.
To the math team members, standardized tests are what uncontested layups are to Michael Jordan.
"Those are like strict recall," Hicks says. "You do no thinking."
And the tests at math competitions? Those are more like off-balance three-pointers with one second left on the shot clock and two defenders in your face.
When they sink the shot, there is no crowd that goes wild. Math competitions aren't much of a spectator sport. But the team members know what they have accomplished.
"When we were third at state last year," Mierau says, "we stayed up all night running around the resort and looking at our trophies."
Here's a sample problem from the pre-calculus team competition. The four team members had four minutes to solve it.The number of employees laid off each year in a company is inversely proportional to the square of the company's profit for that year. The profit for the year is directly proportional to the number of years elapsed since 1989. Consider the year 1990 to be one year elapsed, 1991 to be two years, etc. In 1990, 81 employees were laid off and in 1992 the company made $1 million profit. How many employees were laid off in 1992?
Gaither High School math coach Susan Hammer gives this answer for the variation problem: Using the information in the first two sentences, set up two equations:
e = k/p2, where e is the number of employees laid off, k is a constant for inverse proportion and p is profit, and p = ry, where p is again profit, r is the constant for direct proportion and y is the number of years since 1989.
From the third and fourth sentences, we know that when y = 1, e = 81 and that when y = 3, p = 1.
Plug in the second set of numbers into the second formula, ry = p, r3 = 1, so r = 1/3. Since r is a constant value, we now know that p = (1/3)y. Using that information, we can plug a new value for p into the first equation, e = k/p2, which can also be stated as p2e = k. Now, ((1/3) y)2e = k, or (1/9)y2e = k.
By plugging in the y = 1 and e = 81 values, k = (1/9)(1)(81); so, k = 9.
Now, the value for the constant in the first equation can be plugged in, so e = 9/p2. In 1992, when y = 3 and p = 1, the equation is: e = 9/1, so e = 9. Nine employees were laid off in 1992.