No. 1 and Counting

Six young math whizzes from the U.S. win an international competition in record style

If the United States sends six kids to the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong, where a perfect individual score is 42, and together they score 252, does the country have reason to cheer?

If you can't answer that one, then you desperately need a remedial course in arithmetic (or perhaps just new batteries in your calculator). The U.S. team members, all public high-school students, started out by competing against 350,000 of their peers on the American High School Mathematics Examination, aced two tougher exams, and prepped for a month at the U.S. Naval Academy. Only then did they board a...

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