LIMESTONE, Maine — The Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM) took first place and came home with five medals in the Maine State Math Meet, which drew more than 900 students to the Augusta Civic Center on April 3.
MSSM’s Brett Foster, a senior from Fairfield, earned the only perfect score and received the George Millay Award, named after the Maine native who helped establish the New England Math League.
“I was excited that all of my hard work from over the past four-plus years has paid off,” Foster said. “This will certainly help me in my future career in the STEM field.”
The MSSM team consisted of: Foster; Tobyn Blatt, a senior from Brunswick; Wyatt Giroux, a senior from Wales; David Govoni, a senior from Skowhegan; James Hawkes, a sophomore from Portland; Jordan Theriault, a junior from Caribou; Ethan Winters, a junior from Farmington; Hyoju Kweon, a junior from South Korea; Jack Kang, a junior from South Korea; Wesley Chalmers, a freshman from Scarborough; and Eunice Liu, alternate.
Giroux shared, “I feel like the Maine Association of Math Leagues has been helpful in preparing me for the critical thinking that I will need in engineering, which is what I plan to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
MSSM’s 10-member team won five medals. Foster captured the first-place spot for both the event and the overall regular season. Govoni, who plans to attend the University of Maine, was third in the meet and sixth for the regular season. Hawkes took first place for 10th-graders and fourth in the regular season. Winters received first place for 11th-graders and seventh for the regular season; Jack Kang received eighth place for 11th-graders.
This was the last math meet for Pete Pedersen, Math Department chair at MSSM, as he will retire from teaching at the end of this school year. He has taken the MSSM team to the state meet for 16 years and chaired the meet from 1991 to 2008.
Blatt, who will attend the University of Maine with a double major in economics and mathematics, said, “For this year’s state meet we went in knowing it was Mr. Pedersen’s last year, which added a little bit more pressure than in the past, but we couldn’t have been happier with the result. I think I speak for our whole team when I say that this year felt a little bit more special to be able to give Mr. Pedersen a trophy in his last meet.”
