EXETER, NH (May 10, 2007)—Phillip Exeter Academy senior Sherry Gong, a resident of San Juan, P.R., has been named a top winner of the 2007 U.S. Mathematics Olympiad. Gong tied for second place among the highest scores on the nationwide exam and will earn a scholarship award for college. The top 12 USAMO winners will be honored during an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. on May 20–21, 2007.

Gong will go on to take a Team Selection Test (TST), which will be held immediately following the ceremony in Washington, D.C.  The combined TST and USAMO scores will determine which six students will become members of the U.S. team, who will compete in the International Mathematics Olympiad to be held in Hanoi, Vietnam this July.

The USAMO is a six-question, two-day, nine-hour essay/proof examination held in April. All problems can be solved using pre-calculus methods. The 12 winners competed against a total of 505 U.S. Olympiad participants. Invited participants who qualified for the USAMO in March competed on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) against 10,000 students. Those students were culled from a field of 413,000 from 5,100 U.S. schools—and more than 225,000 worldwide—during the American Mathematics Competition, which was held in February. In 1950, the first mathematical contest was held in New York City. It was sponsored by the Mathematics Association of America, and was given in approximately 238 schools to approximately 6,000 New York City students.

Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, students come from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds. The diverse student body comes from approximately 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and 26 foreign countries.

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