Math club members attended their first math competition, Math Day at the Beach, on Feb. 24. Sophomores Joyee Chen, Nicholas Delianedis, William Hsieh, Nikhil Jha and Harry Song and freshman Anthony Tan placed sixth in the team relay.

California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) opened the event to 38 high schools.

According to CSULB Department of Mathematics and Statistics website, the competition is a multiple choice test and team relay.

In two groups of three, the first person solves the first number of the question; the answer will help the next person.

“The questions are made to be quite difficult to understand at first, which causes people to misread their questions easily,” Tan said.

To prepare for the competition, math club members practiced solving questions in a team format.

“We [meet] every Wednesday where we will discuss interesting problems and eat lunch together,” Song said. “We also have other competitions to prepare for such as [American Mathematics Competitions (AMC)]. AMC is also all multiple choice problems, which helped us to prepare.”

CSULB recognized the math team for competing against older high school students.

“The CSULB math professor proclaimed to the entire ballroom full of math students and advisers how impressive the win was for Portola only having freshmen and sophomores,” math department chair Shelley Godett said.