Student excels in elite math contest.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

Eric Larson has a difficult time articulating the source of his passion for abstract math, at least to the lay person.

Nor can the 16-year-old South Eugene High School junior fully explain his drive to compete at the highest levels, no matter how rigorous the preparation.

"I don't know," he said in the slightly weary tone of someone who's been asked the question before by people with limited capacity to understand. "It's just fun."

In late July, Larson won a silver medal from this summer's International Mathematical Olympiad, an elite competition that brings together the world's brightest young math minds. He was the first Oregonian ever to participate and placed in the top fourth among 536 competitors.

Held in Hanoi, Vietnam, this year's annual contest - the 48th of its kind - drew teams from 95 countries. After excelling on a series of qualifying exams he began taking back in middle school, Larson was selected last spring as one of 12 finalists for the United States team, an honor that earned him an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., to pick up an award and take a second version of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad exam.

After he had returned home, he got a telephone call saying he had made it on the six-member team, along with students - all but one older than he - from California, Illinois, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Maryland.

He almost couldn't go: Neither he nor his mother, Winnie Kerner, had read the fine print about needing to apply for a passport early on in the qualifying process.

"I thought, I'll die if he gets this far and he can't get the passport," said Kerner, a piano teacher and University of Oregon keyboarding instructor.

Fortunately, after finagling an appointment with the U.S. passport office, the pair made a whirlwind trip to Seattle and came back with the document in hand.

The U.S. team flew first to Beijing, where they spent 10 days training, acclimating and seeing sights, then on to Hanoi to compete. The contest consisted of six problems, which participants were given nine hours to solve over the course of two days. They sat at tables with nothing but pencils, compasses and stacks of scratch paper. Calculators aren't allowed, but wouldn't be useful anyway, he explained.

"What determines how well you're going to solve a problem is how well you can think about math," he said.

Unlike some years, no contestant earned a perfect score this time. Thirty-nine earned gold medals, 83 silver and 131 bronze, and the U.S. team placed fifth.

Larson said he wishes he'd had more time, but feels "I guess OK" about his performance.

The boy is the latest Roosevelt Middle School alum to earn high honors in the realm of mathematics, furthering the school's reputation as something of a launching pad for young phenoms. For years, teams from Roosevelt have excelled - and sometimes dominated - in regional and state MATHCOUNTS competitions.

Recently, another former Roosevelt student, 2007 South Eugene graduate Dmitry "Mitka" Vaintrob, earned $200,000 worth of scholarships in prestigious math and science competitions, including a $100,000 first-place award in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology.

Vaintrob's father, UO math professor Arkady Vaintrob, has been a mentor to Larson. The boy joined Vaintrob's math study circle as a middle-schooler, took a class from him last year and meets with him regularly for study and advice.

"Eric and he just kind of click," Kerner said.

But Kerner credits longtime Roosevelt math teacher Marna Knoer with recognizing Larson's talent and encouraging him to compete.

"We wouldn't have ever known (the contests) existed if it weren't for her," she said.

She contacted Knoer when Larson was a fifth-grader, after she'd pulled him from his math class at Evergreen Alternative Elementary and gotten him a private tutor. She and his father, musician and UO music theory professor Steve Larson, knew he was exceptional in math and needed more challenging work.

When Knoer met the boy, she asked him how he would show there was an infinite number of primes. "He answered just like that, and she said, OK, we're going to put you in Algebra II next year," Kerner said.

Knoer followed the Hanoi competition on the Web and was in touch with Kerner.

"Eric was always very serious about doing his math," said Knoer, noting that the boy's younger sister, 12-year-old Hannah, is also gifted in math. "He really loved it, and it was very important to him. Between math and music, he was a pretty dedicated kid."

Indeed, Larson is also an accomplished pianist who has been a state-level winner in each of the last three years in the Oregon Junior Bach Festival.

Larson said he likes piano, but he'd choose math in a heartbeat if he could do only one. He's not sure of college or career plans yet, but hopes to attend a top-flight mathematics school - perhaps the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.