A 13-Year-Old Math Whiz on the Best Calculators and Online-Chess Sites
June 21 2017 - 3:25PM
Dow Jones News
By Chris Kornelis
I do watch TV -- perhaps more than I should. I've been watching
"The Twilight Zone" -- the really old one -- on Netflix. I got
interested because of my father, who's into sci-fi. I'm into sci-fi
pretty much. I guess it's sort of a nerdish thing.
An excellent website that has helped me a lot is
artofproblemsolving.com. Its math textbooks were some of the key
resources that I used when I was younger to get up to this high
level of math. It also has an excellent website with an online
community of mathy people, and an online school.
I play a lot of online chess on Chess.com. There are very good
people to play chess against on the site, whereas at my house not
so much. No offense to my parents, but they're not as good at chess
as I am.
I play a card game called Mao. It's played with two regular
decks shuffled together. When you win a round by getting rid of all
of your cards, you make a new rule that people have to follow, but
you don't tell them what it is. They have to deduce what the rule
is by how it's applied and how they get penalized for not doing
what it is they're supposed to do.
My Texas math team is spread out all across the state, so we use
Google Hangouts to practice our team rounds. This is critical. We
managed to get a perfect score on team rounds -- but if we hadn't,
we wouldn't have won.
Calculators are allowed in Mathcounts competitions. My favorite
is the TI-30x IIS. It's simple and really fast. It has a lot of
memory locations, too -- not just the horribly confusing memory on
cheaper calculators.
I also use a site called Expii.com. It has all sorts of math and
science lessons that you can go through and learn at your own pace.
It has some interesting math puzzles, too. I've spent quite some
time on those.
I got a cellphone last year to stay in contact with my mother
while I'm at math camps and not within a 20-foot radius of her. My
current one is a SamsungGusto 3 flip phone. I don't really use it
to get on the internet; I pretty much just use it for calling.
I have a fidget spinner that's shaped like the Batman logo
[similar model shown], with two weights instead of three. It's hard
to explain what the draw is. It's just one of those things.
Edited from an interview by Chris Kornelis
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 21, 2017 15:10 ET (19:10 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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