“I always joke with my friends that I should have been the captain of the robotics team instead of the football team,’’ said John Wenzel, who is the quarterback, the position at other schools most likely to be awarded the BMOC title. “But at MIT, there is no BMOC because everybody is really special in some way. I might be the quarterback of the football team, but someone else has three patents and another won a national math competition. It’s hard to stand out.’’
But winning the Integration Bee, former winners say, does make you stand out.
“It definitely gives bragging rights,’’ said Sriram Krishnan, who won the Integration Bee four times as a grad student. “But geek pride is something you exercise with caution. It’s not necessarily a pickup line I would use.’’
On Tuesday night, as the 16 finalists in this year’s bee took their place in the front row of the lecture hall, the audience of about 100 got rowdy in what has become a signature part of the competition. Some held signs cheering for their classmates; others held signs featuring spherical coordinates; all jeered at stupid mistakes and shook their heads at the pure skill of the competitors.
Integrals, one of the core constructions in modern mathematics, are not important math, as they like to say at MIT, but they can be very tricky. Solving them head to head, very fast, on stage in front of a hooting and hollering audience of peers - many of whom are racing to the solution on scrap paper - is visibly stressful. Many of the competitors were a jittery mess when they stepped to the blackboard.
“It’s a different type of math because it’s about competition and speed,’’ said Abhinav Kumar, a former Grand Integrator who now runs the competition. “It’s like if you win a spelling bee; that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be a great writer.’’
