Big E and Special K contests 2014

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The Big E and Special K contests (PDF) were held on Saturday, November 1. These are mathematics contests for undergraduate University of Waterloo students.

The Special K contest is for first-year students and the Big E contest is for upper-year students.

Both contests consist of six problems, and complete written solutions are required. This year, 40 students participated, and in both contests there was a tie for first place.

The winners of the Big E contest:

  • First place - Daniel Spivak and Kaiyu (Kevin) Wu,
  • Third place - Kangning (Colin) Chen

The next four students (in alphabetical order) were:

  • Rutger Campbell
  • Sam Eisenstat
  • Alexandru Gatea
  • Shouzhen Gu

and they were followed by:

  • Anton Borissov
  • Wenchao Du
  • Xijin Liang
  • Huaxin (Henry) Liu
  • Kevin Luo
  • Ritvik Ramkumar
  • Jordan Teitelbaum

The winners of the Special K contest:

  • First place - Henry Aniobi and Letian Chen
  • Third place - Zhengyu (Jarry) Gu
  • Fourth place - Mike Li

The next four students (in alphabetical order) were:

  • Billy Jin
  • Tianxiao Liu
  • Antonio Molina Lovett
  • Nihal Pednekar

followed in turn by:

  • Xinle (Clair) Dai
  • Suleyman Hasanzade
  • Dancheng Hu
  • Andrew Jay
  • Tong Lin
  • Stephen Wen

Congratulations to all the contestants, especially the to the winners! In each contest, the two first-place winners will each receive a $175 prize and the third-place finisher will receive a $100 prize.

Special thanks to Christopher Small who suggested many of the problems for this year’s contest.

Stephen New