By Milan Babik '01

It was nearly eight o'clock in the evening and the Alfond Athletic Center gym was empty but for two teenagers immersed in a workout. One, grimacing like an Olympic weight lifter, was doing bench presses. The other was frantically pedaling away on the bike, a stationary Lance Armstrong.

But the bench press bar was completely bare. The controls on the bike were set near the minimum. And there was another hint that these were not your typical sports campers: a white booklet of sample SAT math questions spread wide open in front of the sweating bike rider-a Pythagoras, not Armstrong, wannabe.

The teenagers Canada/USA Mathcamp is a different application of the summer camp formula with math lectures, workshops and other-activities with a mathematical slant. This year the program was hosted by Colby-last year the camp was at the University of British Columbia-and ran from July 8 through August 12.

To reserve their spot, the participants, some of the sharpest math whizzes from American, Canadian and other high schools, had to pass a tough qualifying quiz. They solved and asked questions like "If G is a p-group, |G|=p^n, is Aut G necessarily isomorphic to some subgroup of Aut (C_p)^n (which is isomorphic to GL_n(Z/pZ))?".

"Thought-provoking lectures given on such topics as number theory, topology, artificial intelligence, probability by the best-known authorities in their fields," said Chintan Hossain of Wilmington, Del. "During the camp I was at a constant state of stimulation."

Led by top-notch faculty and graduate student mentors from institutions including Colby, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Stanford, the students engaged in cognitive gymnastics. In fact, it wasn't the hike in the Maine outdoors that was the favorite event, but the challenge of doing 30 proofs in 30 minutes. Said Hwang Shinyoung, a South Korean teenager studying in Massachusetts: "We studied and played in an equally divided standard."

At $3,000, the camp wasn't cheap (Hossain said his parents noted that it cost the same as taking his entire family to Bangladesh). But the camp's value may prove incalculable to the teenagers who gathered on Mayflower Hill. "Some of the ideas the campers encounter here are not taught until graduate school," said Colby's Fernando Gouvêa (mathematics), who taught one of the Mathcamp courses. "They are so far ahead of their high school classmates, it's amazing. They want to eat, drink and breathe math."