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La Cañada High School ran circles around the competition in ������ú’s 34th annual on Feb. 11 in Winter Hall. About 100 regional high school students matched math wits in the event on the eve of Super Bowl, but it was La Cañada that was the Overall Winner for 9-10^th grade and 11-12^th grade.

John Chung from Oaks Christian won Chalk Talk, a 10-12-minute presentation on the topic of Fibonacci numbers, which was chosen because it’s the 34^th year of the contest and 34 is a Fibonacci number.

“The sequence of Fibonacci numbers starts with 1, 1,” says Anna Aboud, who chairs ������ú’s mathematics department. “After this, each subsequent term is obtained by adding the two previous terms. Thus, the sequence continues with 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.”

This year’s T-shirt design has a picture of the Fibonacci spiral as well as a formula for the nth Fibonacci number. “Using squares of side lengths given by the Fibonacci numbers, you can draw a Fibonacci spiral, which approximates the golden spiral, a prominent shape found in nature and art,” Aboud says.

Oaks Christian won the Written Team Exams for both 9-10^th graders as well as 11-12th graders. The College Bowl competition, complete with buzzers modeled after the 1960’s TV show College Bowl, was won by Cate School in the 9-10^th grade division, while La Cañada claimed the 11-12^th grade contest.

Other competing teams included Dos Pueblos, Providence, Santa Barbara, Laguna Blanca and San Marcos.

The evening concluded in ������ú’s Global Leadership Center with dinner, an awards ceremony and a keynote speech from , site lead of Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, who talked about how a passion for math led to building a quantum computer.