This Sunday, December 6, 2009, Sage Hill School will be hosting the final round of the Southern California Mathematical Olympiad (SCMO), an annual mathematical contest sponsored by Math Zoom Academy. The competition will take place from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Everyone in the community is welcome and encouraged to attend. There will be over two hundred students and their families on campus.

SCMO aims to stimulate the interest of high school students in Mathematics and develop their problem-solving abilities. The contest is presented by Dr. Hongkai Zhao, Math Professor at UCI; Mr. Noureddine El Alam, Math Department Chair at Sage Hill High School; and Professor Mihaela Vajiac, Math Professor at Chapman University.

• The event will begin with a Math talk, entitled "How Computers Use Mathematics to Solve Real World Problems," given by Dr. Hongkai Zhao, Math Professor at UCI. This talk relates the use of Mathematics in real-world problems. Dr. Zhao will provide answers to interesting questions such as, from the standpoint of Mathematics, is there a limit to how fast and efficient computers will become?

• After the talk, the event will go on to the second chapter, the SCMO Team Challenge. While monitoring the scoreboard of the game, we will be talking about the various Mathematics competitions, sample problems for those competitions, and the benefits of participating in such competitions. Some hard-to -find photos and video clips of some of the competitions will be shown as well.

• Next on the agenda is the Grand Contest, where the top three scorers from the qualifying test present the solutions to given problems in front of a panel of judges and the audience.

• The finale is the Award Ceremony.