Laramie grad wins national math contest

Posted 9/5/19

LARAMIE (WNE) — Qingfeng Li, who graduated from Laramie High School this spring, has won the national Trig-Stars contest, a competition that tests high schoolers on trigonometry.

Li was …

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Laramie grad wins national math contest

Posted

LARAMIE (WNE) — Qingfeng Li, who graduated from Laramie High School this spring, has won the national Trig-Stars contest, a competition that tests high schoolers on trigonometry.

Li was one of 36 state winners to enter into the competition that’s run by the National Society of Professional Surveyors.

Li earned $2,000 for his victory. Laramie High School math teacher Paul Street, who serves as the sponsoring teacher at LHS, also earned $1,000 for Li’s score.

Austin Mazenko of Greenwood Village, Colorado, placed second in this year’s competition while Henry Hein of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, placed third. Mazenko had won last year’s competition.

“Qingfeng is kind of a legend among his peers,” said Street, who teaches the upper-level math classes at LHS “He could have started UW as a junior.”

In fact, by the time Li finished high school, he had completed seven UW classes with a 4.0.

Li had maxed out on LHS’s math classes in seventh grade. That’s the year he took the AP Calculus AB class with Street.

“His feet barely touched the floor when he was in seventh grade,” Street said.

While sometimes having an underclassman test into the AP Calculus class can happen, having a seventh grader wasn’t a common experience for Street.

“That’s really unusual, as young as he was,” Street told the Laramie Boomerang. “That was mighty young.”

As an eighth-grader in 2015, Li became the first student to win the Wyoming State Mathcounts competition at the University of Wyoming three years in a row.

Street added that LI’s primary interests are computer programming and artificial intelligence — not math.

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