Students compete in USC’s first Integral Bee


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Stanley Hong, a freshman majoring in economics, emerged as the winner of the bee, taking home a $100 prize. (Amanda Chou | Daily Trojan)

It was an evening of shock, awe and fierce but friendly competition in Stauffer Science Hall, where calculus aficionados gathered Monday night for a mathematical sparring.

The USC Math Club, with support from the mathematics department, hosted the University’s first ever Integral Bee. Forty-three undergraduate participants competed for cash prizes by solving integrals — operators in calculus commonly conceptualized as the area under a curve.

Ajay Srinivasan, a freshman majoring in mathematics, first came up with the idea to host an Integral Bee at USC after seeing similar events at other universities across the country.

“In high school, I’ve seen the ones at MIT, at Berkeley and around the world,” Srinivasan said. “I was telling my dad over a FaceTime call: ‘If there was one at USC, then I’d participate.’ And he was like, ‘You should make one yourself.’”

Srinivasan reached out to friends he met from a problem-solving course in the fall, and together, they approached the USC Math Club to see if they would host. After weeks of emailing professors, gathering volunteers and sending mission statements to advisors, the event was set to happen. The Math Club announced the event April 5, promising food and monetary prizes.

Integration bees held at other universities, most notably at MIT where the competition was founded in 1981, have gone viral on YouTube. The 2006 Integration Bee at MIT, uploaded in full, amassed almost 2.8 million views; another video of a final round at MIT has more than 5.1 million views. Monday marked the first time that an event of the same format was held at USC.

“I actually watched MIT and everything … [participating is] a dream come true,” said JuAn Lee, a sophomore majoring in mathematics. “It’s super hype that it’s here.”

The event began with seven preliminary rounds, where two random participants from the pool of 43 were called up to the blackboard to solve an integral under a given time limit. The first to write and circle the correct answer won the round; players who lost were not eliminated. Players lost if they submitted two incorrect attempts. 

The eight highest-scoring individuals moved on to the quarterfinals. After that, just four remained: Lee; Stanley Hong, a freshman majoring in economics; Alexander Morgan, a senior majoring in electrical and computer engineering and Frank He, a freshman majoring in mathematics and computer engineering and computer science. Morgan and Hong advanced to the final round.

After an intense and prolonged final round, Hong emerged as the winner of USC’s first Integral Bee, taking home $100. Morgan took second place, Lee third and He fourth.

“I was pretty nervous because one more wrong answer and I [would have been] out,” Hong said. “I’m glad that nothing went wrong … I feel like it was mainly that I got lucky.”

Srinivasan said he is “ambitious” and “optimistic” about hosting another Integral Bee next year.

“I think people at the math department are stoked as well to have a fun recurring event for students,” he said. “An ambitious goal for us is to take this beyond USC to bring in universities around Southern California — so we have Caltech, LMU, Harvey Mudd … The long-term goal is to reach out to them and see if, together, we can set up this fun environment for students to interact with problem solving.”