The Minnesota State High School Mathematics League is the premier high school mathematics league in the state of Minnesota. It was founded in 1980 by Macalester College professor Wayne Roberts. The league holds five statewide tournaments per year from November through February, as well as a state tournament in March.
Contents
Questions
The problems posed are divided into five events - Individual events A, B, C, and D, and the team event. Events A, B, C, and D usually consist of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and precalculus topics, respectively. The team event is a mix of all four.
Scoring
Each competitor chooses to compete in two individual events. Each high school chooses its eight top members, including at least two students below the eleventh grade, as its "varsity" team, which actually earns points in the name of the school and competes together in the team event; the other students simply compete for themselves in whichever two individual events they choose. Each individual event contains one one point question and three two point questions, so the maximum a person may score per meet is fourteen points. The team events each contain six questions worth four points each. A team's total score is determined by adding the individual scores of the varsity members and the varsity team score. At the end of the season, the teams with the highest scores in the state continue to the state tournament.
State Tournament
The state tournaments have been held at South St. Paul High School since 2008. Before that, state tournaments were usually held at Eagan High School. The state tournament begins with the Invitational event. The Invitational is a 30-minute-long test taken by the top 50 students in the season. This is followed by the Math Bowl and an awards ceremony. The Math Bowl brings together the top 10 scorers from the Invitational, and they compete on stage by solving ten problems one at a time within a limited amount of time. Later during the day, there is a meet that is structured like the other meets during the year. The only exception is that there are 15 minutes for an individual event and 30 minutes for a team event. The tournament concludes with a banquet in the evening and a second award ceremony.
Winners
The League officially recognizes individual and team winners of two types each season, one with the highest overall season score, and one with the highest state tournament score. Since the 1988-1989 season, the League has recognized an additional Class A state tournament winner. In 2004-2005, this designation was changed to Tier 2 rather than Class A, with larger schools designated as Tier 1.
Seventeen distinct students have achieved perfect scores of 70 points in the regular season: Erik Vee in 1991-1992, Derek Farmer in 1993-1994, Michael Korn in 1995-1996, Andrew Gacek, Nate Sheetz, and Sam Lindsay-Levine in 1999-2000, Dan Baker in 2002-2003, Ning Zhou in 2003-2004, Nick Arnosti in 2006-2007, Shui Hu in 2007-2008, Rohit Agrawal and Gaurav Singh in both 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, Abram Sanderson in 2012-2013, Daniel Qu, Daniel Stein, Henry Wang, Nathan Weckwerth in 2014-2015, and Daniel Qu in 2015-2016.
Perfect scores on the state tournament are more common, but only Rohit Agrawal (2009-2010) and Daniel Qu (2015-2016) have achieved perfect scores in the regular season and tournament in the same year.
Other League-Sponsored Activities
The Minnesota State High School Mathematics League sponsors the Minnesota All-State Mathematics Team, which competes at ARML (a national math tournament) annually. Selection is based on MSHSML season and state tournament scores and American Mathematics Competitions scores.
The team was founded in 1987. Since then, the Gold team has finished in the top ten at ARML in division A 13 times. The Gold team has finished in the top five twice, winning the national championship in 1997 and taking 5th in 2016. The Maroon team has finished in the top ten in division B 8 times, and won division B in 1993.
The All-State team also sends 16 students (2 teams) annually to the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament and 8 students (1 team) to the Princeton University Mathematics Competition.