High school math whiz gets perfect score

MANILA, Philippines – An incoming sophomore at the Chiang Kai Shek College got a perfect score while more than 200 Filipino students got high marks in the correspondence-based Canadian Mathematics Competition (CMC) administered recently in the country by the Mathematics Trainers’ Guild-Philippines.

Simon Chua, president of MTG-Philippines, said that Henry Jefferson Morco of Chiang Kai Shek College got a perfect score in the CMC’s Cayley contest, earning him a CMC 2009 medal.

A total of 105 other Filipino students got certificates of distinction for making it to the top 25 percent.

The CMC is an annual competition organized by the Center for Education in Mathematics and Computing based at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

The Mathematics Trainers Guild-Philippines (MTG) administered the contest – which consisted of Pascal for Grade 9, Cayley (Grade 10), Fermat (Grade 11) and Euclid (Grade 12) – to Filipino students between February and April this year.

More than 70,000 students worldwide participated in the contest.

John Russell Virata of Gideon Academy was the top scorer among the Filipino students who took the Fermat Contest. Fifty-one others got certificates of distinction.

In the Pascal Contest, Austin Chua of St. Jude Catholic School ranked first among the 90 other students who took it.

Seven students, meanwhile, topped the Euclid Contest, namely Geraldine Baniqued of St. Paul College-Pasig, Carmela Antoinette Lao of St. Jude Catholic School, John Russell Virata of Gideon Academy, Aldric Reyes and Matthew Ng of Chiang Kai Shek College, Zheng Rong Wu and Ricci Ryan Rojo of Zamboanga Chong Hua High School.

The MTG is currently training hundreds of students who will compete in different international math contests this year in the United States, Hong Kong and China. – Rainier Allan Ronda