Math whiz takes skills to state tournament on Owatonna

OWATONNA — If you don’t know your foci, directrices and asymptotes, then you don’t know your analytic geometry. And you don’t stand a chance against Josh Tveite.

Tveite, who is a junior at Owatonna High School, took down every other Math League competitor in the Big Nine to claim the division title, and on Monday, he took his smarts to the state tournament at South St. Paul High School.

Tveite didn’t come out on top at the state level, but that doesn’t mean his calculations didn’t make a mark. According to his coach Steve Benson, Tveite is the first Owatonnan to make it that far in the Math League competition since the mid-1990s. Out of the 3,500 students in the state who competed in Math League during this academic year, less than six dozen of them landed an invitation to the state tournament.

“It’s the top 2 percent of the state,” said Benson. “It’s a pretty rigorous competition.”

Tveite has been multiplying his mathematical skills for about five years, however. Math comes so easy to him that he consistently chooses the two most difficult categories in the whole competition to compete in: trigonometry and pre-calculus.

“Josh has been doing the two most difficult categories all year,” said Benson. “He actually won the division title doing that. His performance at the state meet was impressive, ranking in the top 20 competitors over the length of the competition.”

Benson said even when Tveite entered the Math League in the ninth grade, it was obvious that he would do exponentially well. He said Tveite was one of the top two competitors in the ninth grade division, and last year, Tveite almost took the title as a sophomore.

“Last year, he missed the division title by one or two questions,” said Benson. “He’s got a lot history of besting math competitors.”

While Tveite said he gets hung up on some of the analytic math and complex trigonometry problems, he has scored better in the competitions than even those competing in the easier categories of algebra and geometry. But the odds of taking a title are modest, and Tveite said there is an equation to match every competitor.

“They have lots of weird problems that you’ll never do stuff like that in school,” said Tveite. “One of the talents of the Math League writers is they can take any math problem and make it insane.”

What stopped Tveite from taking the state championship was a sprinkling of analytic geometry and a run-in with trigonometry.

“Hyperboles are not my friends,” he said.

Tveite isn’t just a star among mathematicians. He also competed on the Mock Trial team this year, and he is going into the final stretch with the Knowledgeable competition — where students are tested on general knowledge.

In the Knowledgeable competitions, math gives Tveite another angle, as it sometimes appears in the quiz rounds.

“A lot of times in the Knowledgeable meets you get math problems, and you only get 15 seconds to do them,” said Tveite. He said in those situations, he just does the math in his head. “People just look at me funny when I do that.”

Melissa Kaelin can be reached at 444-2372.

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