About Us

Seattle Infinity Math Circle is a student run and operated organization. Classes are taught by the students of the Student Leader Group (SLG). The SLG is responsible for planning events and organizing the math circle; we also invite various guest lecturers for our classes. Our goals are to make math fun, exciting, and challenging while raising student involvement and interest in math. To this extent, we encourage student to participate in math competitions as most of these competitions place a higher emphasis on problem-solving skills than in the standard classroom.

Joy Zheng (Founder and President) attends Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and has formerly attended Lakeside School and Odle Middle School (PRISM program). She is a 2010 USA Math Olympiad honorable mention and 4-time participant. She had gone to the Math Olympiad Summer Program in 2010, 2009, and 2008 (black, blue, and red groups respectively) and has been a gold and bronze medalist at the 2009 and 2008 China Girls' Math Olympiad, respectively. She will be a part of the US team for the 2010 CGMO. Her hobbies and interests include math, reading, origami, knitting, writing, card games, baking, politics, economics, and debate. She is a 5-year consecutive “Math is Cool” Masters Champion, a MathCounts 2007 State Champion, the 2008 9/10th grade Northwest Math Championship winner, a perfect scorer on the AMC8 and AMC10, and a 2-time MathCounts Nationals Participant (placing 15th and 21st).

Student Leader Group:

Yuta Kato attends Inglemoor High School. He has competed in the AMC contests, Mathcounts, Blaine, and ARML and he went to National Mathcounts 2007. Yuta likes to run, read, and fight with his brother.

Yota Kato attends various schools at different times of the day and year, and has competed in the AMCs, Mathcounts, and Blaine.

Albert Chu attends Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and has formerly attended Odle Middle School (PRISM program). In 2009, he is a USAMO participant, a Mathcounts State Champion, and a Mathcounts National participant (placing 41st). He has been an AIME participant since 2008. In addition, he has won awards and particpated in various math competitions such as MIC, WSMC, AMC 8, AMC 10, MATHCOUNTS, Northwest Intramural, Mu Alpha Theta Fall Classic, Math League, ARML, AIME, USAMO, and others.

Lawrence Xing currently attends Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington, and has been a member of the Art of Problem Solving community since 2004. His interests include mathematics, soccer, chess, and less productive activities such as Magic: The Gathering, reading, and playing computer games. In the past 5 years, he has won awards in various math competitions, including high places in the AMC 8 and AMC 10, and was a top-50 finisher at Mathcounts Nationals 2006. Jonathan Hung (Bellevue High School) has won awards at various math competitions.

    Kaiying Liao (Interlake High School) has participated in a myriad of math competitions.
    Emily Zhang (Newport High School) has won awards at various math competitions.
    Kathleen Zhou (Interlake High School) has won awards at various math competitions.
    Kevin Liu (Odle Middle School) has won awards at various math competitions.

Student Leader Alumni:

Andrew Chou currently attends Stanford University and was a senior at Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington. He has participated in numerous math competitions since fifth grade and has participated in MathCounts Nationals (81st place in 2004) as well as the USAMO. His primary interest other than math is soccer; he plays for a premier soccer team year-round and for the Lakeside varsity team in the spring. He also coaches the Lakeside sixth grade math club.
Sam Keller has competed at various math competitions and is a student at Redmond High School.

Andy Morgan (Garfield High School) currently attends the University of Washington and has competed at various math competitions.

Meir Lakhovsky currently attends Harvard University and was a senior at Redmond High School, where he was the coach and president of the math club. His hobbies include math, chess, track, and debate. He has won several statewide math competitions, most recently the 2007 Fall Classic. In the 2004 MathCounts Nationals, he placed 39th. He represented team Washington at ARML twice, individually placing tied for 2nd and tied for 1st. He is also a two time USAMO participant, and one time invitee to MOSP.

Richard She currently attends Brown University after graduating from Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington.

Qiaochu Yuan is currently at MIT after graduating from Bellevue High School in Bellevue, Washington, where he was the president of the school's math club. He first participated in the AMC competitions as a freshman in 2004, and has gone on to achieve a perfect score on the AMC 12 as well as an Honorable Mention on the USAMO. He has attended PROMYS, a summer program focusing on number theory, and has attended the Research Science Institute, where he had the opportunity to write a mathematical research paper. His other activities and hobbies include piano, frisbee, and guitar.

Current Advisory Committee:

Lon-Chan Chu is currently the Director of Development of the Mobile & Voice Services Platform team at Microsoft. Lon has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests included combinatorial search and real-time systems. After joining Microsoft, he has been working in the communications software for products and services such as NetMeeting, Messenger, and Mobile Services. Outside the work, Lon has been a math coach for 3 years in elementary school (Ben Franklin Elementary at Kirkland, WA) and middle school (Odle Middle at Bellevue, WA). In 2008, he coached the Washington MATHCOUNTS team who won the national 2nd place, and one of the team members won the national championship.
Min Liu is passionate about math education. He has been volunteering for many years as a math coach at Odle Middle School as well as at Northwest Chinese School.

Richard Rusczyk is the CEO of AoPS Incorporated and the President of the Art of Problem Solving Foundation. Both of these organizations produce and support educational opportunities for high-performing math students. He has written or co-written four widely-used mathematics textbooks. He also founded the San Diego Math Circle, now one of the largest Math Circles in the US.

Zijian Zheng is the Principal Development Manager of the Live Search Data Mining team at Microsoft. Zijian has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Sydney. He has worked on application and research in data mining, machine learning, and software since 1999 in an industrial environment. Before that, he was a researcher in data mining and machine learning.

Current and Former Guest Lecturers:

Zachary Abel is a 2006 IMO silver medalist who currently attends Harvard University. He is also an intern at Microsoft.

Chuck Doran is a geometer specializing in mathematics related to string-theoretic physics. He has taught at the University of Washington for the past four years, including co-teaching a class with Henry Cohn from Microsoft Research. Prof. Doran's talk on "String Theory and Mathematics" is based on his invited lectures at SIMUW, the UW Science Forum Colloquium, and Math Day.

Nathan Pflueger became enamoured with Math in 7th grade, and hasn't looked back since. He graduated from Garfield High School in 2005, where his contest achievements included an invitation to MOSP, three particpations in the USAMO, and first-place finishes at several major contests. He currently studies at Stanford University, where he does his best to indulge some hobbies besides math, particularly cycling. He is a section leader for Stanford's introductory programming courses, has written a large number of exercises and solutions for an online Calculus BC course, and enjoys tutoring all levels of math.

Chris Jeuell: I have been very active in mathematics contests and problem solving for the last 15 years, both as a competitor and as a coach. I grew up in the Chicagoland area, and as a student, I was very fortunate to be able to work with a very talented group of mathematics teachers, coaches, and fellow students. As a student, I participated in MATHCOUNTS, the AMC contests, and ARML. These days, I write problems and proofread for a number of math contests. In 1999, I earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in computer science engineering, with a concentration in mathematics, and am currently employed by Microsoft as a software developer. For the last four years, I have taught at the Math Olympiad Summer Program and have served on the committee for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME).

Dipankar Ray is currently a member of the core image and video codecteam at Microsoft. Long ago, he worked in algebraic geometry, doing research on the moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds under the supervision of Andrey Todorov, at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Adam Hesterberg is interested in math.

Noah Skilioch is interested in math.

Seattle Infinity Math Circle

~Existence is a state of mind~