Ding Helps Launch State Math Coalition

Why would high school students form a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation to organize Tennessee students for math competitions? Why would they select student officers, solicit donations, develop a website, and plan and run the first Tennessee Math Tournament?
Junior Albert Ding, co-president of the newly formed Tennessee Math Coalition, said he and fellow co-president, Kevin Li, a sophomore at Montgomery Bell Academy, saw a lack of community and mathematics resources within Tennessee. They realized groups in other states have standing teams that hold practices and organize teams for contests.

“Tennessee has historically not been a very strong state in competition mathematics,” Ding said. “We wanted to provide students here the chance to compete in national competitions, and the best way to make it happen was by connecting people across Tennessee and fostering an environment where this would be possible.

“So much of competition math is focused on the individual.” Ding continued. “People often forget that learning and competing can be more than just what one person can do individually. When you have friends that compete alongside you, everything is just a lot better.” 

The coalition’s inaugural Tennessee Math Tournament on March 22 drew over 60 in-person competitors, including 11 Owls, to the Adventure Science Center in Nashville and over 100 virtually on a custom-built website coded in TypeScript.

Ding and his fellow organizers planned and publicized the event and wrote problems for the speed round, individual round, team round, elimination round, and math bowl contests.

“The only easy thing Albert had to do was recruit the featured speaker, MUS alumnus Dannie Dong ’24, now at Vanderbilt, who spoke on his lifelong passion for mathematics,” said Math Instructor Steve Gadbois, who accompanied the team to Nashville. “When Dannie was a toddler, he would flip through books, not reading them but instead looking at the page numbers.”

Gadbois along with fellow instructors in math Nancy Gates and Darin Clifft served as mentors to Ding as he worked with other students from Memphis, Nashville, and Murfreesboro to form the group last summer.
The coalition has gathered teams for national competitions, including the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament (November and February), the Stanford Math Tournament (April), and the American Regions Mathematics League (May).

Besides going to national competitions and hosting their own, Tennessee Math Coalition organizers have been looking into competition math tutoring and other projects to promote mathematics in Tennessee.

Ding looks forward to competing with coalition members in the upcoming contests from now through his senior year. Although he graduates in 2026, he sees a bright future for the student-run coalition.

“Freshmen and sophomores from MUS are interested,” he said. “We are looking to get younger guys involved so they can run it in the future.”

For more information, visit tnmathcoalition.org.

Caption:
The MUS contingent at the inaugural Tennessee Math Tournament included, from left, Instructor in Math Steve Gadbois, Tennessee Math Coalition Co-president Albert Ding ’26, Ethan Zhao ’26, Max Park ’27, Gus Williams ’28, Carson Alexander ’27, Shay Mukatira ’27, Advay Iyer ’26, Abdullah Khawaja ’27, Ashwin Subramaniam ’26, Joseph Zhao ’28, Lucas Zhang ’26, and Kevin McCullers ’25.
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