A FILIPINO high school student got a perfect score to top the correspondence-based Canadian Math Competition (CMC) held in the country this year.

Henry Jefferson Morco, a high school student from Chiang Kai Shek College in Binondo, Manila, achieved a perfect score in the Cayley contest, making him the recipient of the CMC 2009 medal, said Dr. Simon Chua, president of the Mathematics Trainers Guild of the Philippines (MTG).

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The MTG administered the contest to Filipino students between February and April this year. The exam consisted of Pascal for Grade IX, Cayley (Grade X), Fermat (Grade XI), and Euclid (Grade XII).

Chua said 105 other students got certificates of distinction for making it to the top 25 percent while more than 200 students got high marks in the correspondence-based CMC.

John Russell Virata of Gideon Academy became the top scorer among the Filipino students who took the Fermat Contest. Fifty-one others got the certificates of distinction.

In the Pascal Contest, Austin Chua of St. Jude Catholic School ranked first among the 90 other students who took the exam.

Seven students topped the Euclid Contest. They were identified as Geraldine Baniqued of St. Paul College-Pasig, Carmela Antoinette Lao of St. Jude Catholic School, John Russell Virata of Gideon Academy, Aldric Reyes and Matthew Ng of Chiang Kai Shek College, and Zheng Rong Wu and Ricci Ryan Rojo of Zamboanga Chong Hua High School.

The CMC is an annual competition organized by the Center for Education in Mathematics and Computing based at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

More than 70,000 students worldwide took the contest.

Underscoring the significance of training as a factor in winning, Chua said: “When you are not practicing, remember, someone, somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win."

The MTG is currently training hundreds of students that will compete in different international math contests this year including in the United States, Hong Kong, and China.

Recently, two Filipino students, John Robert Valcos and Sarah Jane Cua, beat more than 100 contestants to emerge as the champion in the recently held 3rd Brand Sudoku International Open 2009 Princess Somsawali Cup in Bangkok, Thailand.

Sudoku is a logic-based combinatorial number placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 boxes (also called blocks or regions) contained the digits from 1 to 9 only one time each. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid.

Completed puzzles are usually a type of Latin square with an additional constraint on the contents of individual regions. (AH/Sunnex)