closure<\/a> of BMC\u2019s flagship program, BMC-Upper, due to \u201cridiculous\u201d fingerprinting requirements as \u201csuch a blow.\u201d<\/p>\nDoris Tsao, a campus professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shared O\u2019Dorney\u2019s feelings.Originally a professor at Caltech, Tsao, who was awarded the MacArthur Foundation\u2019s Genius Grant in 2018, heard about BMC from her colleagues and was hoping to enroll her children in the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really need some common sense,\u201d Tsao said. \u201cI hope the administration sees the situation for what it is. These students want to learn math and be taught by these amazing guest lecturers around the country who are generously donating their time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
University of Toronto professor Gabriel Carroll attended BMC during its first three years. He is a two-time gold medalist at the IMO, once with a perfect score, and a four-time top-five scorer in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Though BMC was beneficial to Carroll\u2019s success in math competitions, he said the most memorable part was the community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBMC opened doors to a wider world of other people with similar interests,\u201d Carroll said in an email. \u201cI lived in Oakland, but I joined a group of friends who carpooled up from the South Bay each week, and we would often go to a cafe and talk for a while after the Circle sessions \u2014 and I\u2019ve still been in contact with some of them decades later.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carroll said in the email he is \u201castonished\u201d at the closure of BMC-Upper \u201cby a seemingly minor administrative requirement,\u201d but highlights the accomplishments of the program and its inspiration for many other math circles across the U.S. and Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Genius Grant recipient and former UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences Chair Claire Tomlin called the program a \u201cjewel\u201d and underscored the role that BMC had in celebrating the \u201cbeauty of mathematics and its broad application to many areas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Freshman Orhan Hosten-Mittermaier recalls the impact that BMC had on his current studies. As a physics major, he noticed himself using creative approaches to solve problems, which he said he learned at the math circle.<\/p>\n
Hosten-Mittermaier shared his appreciation for the structure of BMC, which allowed him to discover the breadth of mathematics that he could learn.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBerkeley Math Circle was one of the few places that taught that kind of math in a way that young kids could actually already start to develop mathematical intuition,\u201d Hosten-Mittermaier said. \u201cIf I imagine myself growing up without Berkeley Math Circle, I think I would have been a different student.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Peter Nofelt, whose child attended BMC-Upper, highlighted that BMC instructors ran their classes as if they were teaching college students, treating students as \u201cpeople that were able to learn and discuss large topics,\u201d and not just kids.<\/p>\n
Current MIT junior and former BMC student Espen Slettnes, for whom minor planet 34379 Slettnes was named after he won first place at the Broadcom MASTERS middle school competition, emphasized how the program has shaped his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c(BMC is) the place where I met my future best friend, and the place that introduced me to Professor (Stankova), whose support and advice throughout my life on numerous other occasions made her, and BMC as a whole, the reason I am where I am today,\u201d Slettnes said in an email. \u201cIts closure is so disheartening.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evan O\u2019Dorney is, by any metric, a genius.\u00a0 At 13 years old, O\u2019Dorney won the 80th Scripps National…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[40964,40952,4932,23204,23214,40963,12672,40959,40961,40957,40962,40951,23211,23231,40953,40954,40955,40958,23232,17162,40956,143,145,144,40960,149,435,23212,23213,23207],"class_list":["post-69162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-34379-slettnes","tag-80th-scripps-national-spelling-bee","tag-barack-obama","tag-berkeley-math-circle","tag-bmc-upper","tag-broadcom-masters","tag-canada","tag-carnegie-mellon-university","tag-claire-tomlin","tag-doris-tsao","tag-espen-slettnes","tag-evan-odorney","tag-gabriel-carroll","tag-genius-grant","tag-george-w-bush","tag-intel-science-talent-search","tag-international-mathematical-olympiad","tag-macarthur-fellow","tag-macarthur-foundation","tag-mit","tag-national-research-council","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-orhan-hosten-mittermaier","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-united-states","tag-university-of-toronto","tag-william-lowell-putnam-mathematical-competition","tag-zvezdelina-stankova"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}