Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) hosted the preliminary round of the annual Pi Day Math Competition, drawing more than 300 enthusiastic high school students from across the country.
The competition is sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education and the Alfardan Group. Now in its eighth year, the competition continues to ignite a passion for mathematics among Qatar’s youth.
Zelealem Yilma is an associate teaching professor of mathematics at CMU-Q, and the lead organizer of the event.
“The Pi Day Math Contest is incredibly popular among high schools,” Yilma noted. “We have had consistent participation from many schools and every year we get a few new ones as well.”
This year, 81 teams participated in the preliminary rounds, demonstrating their problem-solving skills and mathematical prowess. The competition challenges students with a series of mathematical problems. The papers are graded, and the top four teams return to CMU-Q in March for the final round.
This year, the top teams hailed from the following schools: Birla Public School, DPS Modern Indian School, Education City High School and Park House English School.
The Pi Day Math Competition is an annual event in Qatar, and all past question and answer sets are available in both English and Arabic as a teaching resource. Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14 (3/14). Pi is the symbol π, which represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, which is approximately 3.14.
