NORTH COAST, Calif. – Deanna Powell and Logan Knudson have been named co-champions of the 2017-18 Mendocino College math contest series.

Each student correctly solved 28 of the 29 puzzles.

The first runner up was Ari Sunbeam, with 21 correct puzzles.

Mendocino College mathematics instructor Deborah White has been puzzling students with her contest for the past 10 years.

White posts a new puzzle each Monday throughout the school year at www.mendocino.edu/deborah-white and also leaves hard copies posted around the campus.

Powell is a native of Lake County and attended high school at the Rio Linda Adventist Academy in Healdsburg.

She has just finished Mendocino College’s math sequence and will transfer to Chico State in the fall, where she plans to study civil engineering with the goal of working for the international group Engineers Without Borders.

When asked about the contests, Powell said, “I really enjoyed them, particularly the fact that anyone could do them. It brought my friends together, because I shared the puzzles with them, and even people who felt they couldn’t do math got involved.”

Knudson has lived in Lakeport most of his life, attended Clear Lake High School, has just received an Associate of Science degree in mathematics from Mendocino College, and will attend UC Santa Cruz in the fall as a double major in mathematics and physics.

This summer Knudson is doing research at UC Santa Cruz under a National Science Foundation grant. According to Knudson, “The contests were a different kind of math than what we do in class, but I think that they’re really what math is about.”

One of this year’s puzzles reads: If it takes 1,140 digits to number the pages in a book which starts at page one, how many pages are there in the book? (Answer: 416).