PUMaC 2009

For the past week, I did not sleep well. Why? I was responsible for LaTeXing the power round, which meant staying after school every day and waiting for people to push changes to the Google Doc at 2345 (that's 11:45PM non-nerds). Even though I wasn't directly involved with the math, I still had to read through all the proofs, lemmas, claims, w/e to check for unLaTeXed items. From that, I pretty much memorized the following lemma (and its proof :O):

If is a set that generates and is a linear bijection from to , then will generate an isomorphic lattice .

We finished with everything around 20:20 (yay 2020! and yay for 20/20 vision XDD), after incorporating Alex's rewrites for three of the problems. Then I got home, reread the latest Naruto chapter, looked at the solution to 2007 AIME I Problem 15 (a geo problem XD) and went to bed.

Then the next morning, I woke up at 0715 and drove with parents to Princeton. There was relatively little traffic, so we got there at 0815, hopefully at the same time as the rest math team. While were finding McCosh Hall, I spotted TJ heading toward registration, so I got off the car and went to talk to Jenny. I detached from the group a while later to call Dr. Mayers to see where the rest of my team was. He said that they would arrive in roughly 15m, so I stayed out in the cold. I also saw Austin sometime around then, and we talked for a bit.

After 15m, they still didn't come. Austin's friend reported that they're in New Brunswick and would be here in 15m. (Hmm, see a pattern?) So I foolishly trusted their estimated and hung out in the cold. According to the schedule, registration was supposed to close. I held up the A division registration and Austin held up the B division registration. After yet another 15m, Dr. Mayers and Dr. Abramson finally arrived, followed by a pack of 90 people.  Learn to ESTIMATING, people.

Anyway. Once the A teams got settled in McCosh 50, the opening ceremony started. Arthur gave us our room assignments and we promptly dispersed.  Our proctor took us to our room, read us the rules, and distributed our tests. I took Geometry first. There were some fun problems, but 1hr flew by. I'm not quite sure why trig ceva didn't work for the last problem. =/ (lol wtf am i using such a useless theorem)  Next up was Algebra, which I bombed due to lack of practice and exhaustion from the previous test.

The team round was really cool and refreshing. The answer sheet was a crossword puzzle, meaning that you can check if you got a fail answer based on your other answers. I worked on a geo problem for most of the time. I probably could have finished it a lot faster had I not been exhausted and hungry. D: After that I looked at the recursive problem, which was pretty cool. We managed to get all the answers, with the last answer solved at 1m left. Phew.

As we were cleaning up after the team round, our proctor announced the individual finalists :O To my surprise, we had not one or two or three but FOUR individual finalists. And probably to everyone's surprise, I QUALIFIED. At first, I thought he was kidding, but then Pavel told me and the others to get our lunch tickets and run, since we only had 15m to eat. (hmm, another instance of ``15m''. hmm.)

After it occurred to me that I had indeedly qualified, I thought:
There is most definitely something wrong if I make INDIVIDUAL FINALS and then get 7th in Geometry. In other words, the Chinese people failed to do their job (assassinate US mathletes being competent) correctly.

The four AAST finalists ran to the lunch line, grabbed some food, and started munching. Then our proctor called us to head to the testing room. When I entered the room, I saw Brian, who congratulated me for making it (and at the same time, forced me to eat my words -.-) The proctor distributed tests and started the timer. Not long after, I heard the iPhone Tri-Tone sound from my bag. I thought, "oh gawd, why is she texting me at a time like this -___-''." I immediately set my phone to vibrate. However, that was the beginning. Jenny proceeded to text me again and call me twice. Since I didn't train for proofs at all, I barely got a question. Oh well…

So then Brian and I were pretty hungry, having barely eaten before the finals. We headed over to the Panera bread located on Washington St. Afraid of getting lost, I pulled out the map I had printed out the previous night, but proceeded to cut myself. My finger was oozing blood and I failed to pack napkins in my purse, so I applied pressure on the region of the cut and held it in my jacket until the platelets stopped the blood flow. We then got to Panera bread, at which Brian got a Turkey panini (I think: it's almost been a year and I'm back to revise this <_<) and I had a cream of broccoli soup. Anyway we sat down and took our time to eat. Surprisingly, a group of unofficial AAST freshmen/sophomores walked in to eat (while quietly ignoring us ^_^;;) In any case, after we ate, we slowly wandered back to McCosh, during which we sort of got lost.

Then was the awards ceremony. Oh wait, PUMaC was behind schedule, so we watched the quizbowl finals, which AAST won, as always :D Although Pavel just had to screw up the PPPL question, which stands for Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, not Princeton Physics Plasma Lab. The good part was that I disciplined him in Data Structures today for his fail =] What the hell is Physics Plasma anyway…
Then was the real awards ceremony. I got 7th in Geo :D, Sam got 8th and Alex Radek (a Mu Ber) got 3rd in Algebra O_O, John Chiarelli got 7th and Ian Osborn got 5th in Combo. We got an astounding 85/86 on the power round :D and perfect on the team round :D Both Mark and Mr. Holbrook were very happy =] and I was happy that they were happy. Unfortunately, TJ A didn't get announced, which surprised me since I knew they Brian put an enormous amount of effort into it. Therefore, it could be trivially deduced that there was an internal difficulty.

After we regrouped outside with the B division people (including unofficial ones), Aviv and a lost TJ C asked me where TJ A and B were. XD So then I said, "Well you should call them. I'll call Jenny." to which they responded, "lol good idea"

And then I drove home with my parents.

THE END

Er, wait. There's probably stuff that I missed, which you can read about here

The Good:

• I SUCCESSFULLY REPRESENTED AAST IN GEOMETRY :D
• We rock at teamwork :D

The Bad:

• I'm only good in Geometry.
• AAST sucks at individuals.

The Ugly:

• A 25 makes individual finals.
• Our 5551 test distribution worked. rofl.
• A one-man army got 3rd place overall.
• Reading the latest Naruto chapter the night before is an effective studying method.

THE END

Other Thoughts

TJ math team needs to LEARN TO TEAMWORK. They're going to fail a nontrivial amount once the owner of this blog leaves.

Blah. now i can't upload the power round cuz i fucked up apache on my web ssh server. oops.

In other news, you should go buy a racist microwave

In other other news, I managed to use both ``fail'' and ``trivial'' in a blog post ^_^