I bring you this press release from Cal State Long Beach, which details the triumph of a campus math team in a national contest. One of the three-member team, grad student Joshua Lampkins, hails from Gardena and attended El Camino College before transferring to LB.

Here you go, courtesy of the CSULB communications peeps:

"A team of three students from California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) turned in the campus' highest-ever finish at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the oldest and most prestigious math competition in North America.

Graduate student Joshua Lampkins, senior M. Tip Phaovibul and sophomore Sarav Patel teamed up to finish 42nd out of 516 college and universities in the 2007 Putnam math contest (scores were just recently release from the Dec. 1 competition). Their combined score led to CSULB's highest ranking since resuming the competition in 1999, said mathematics professor and team advisor Kent Merryfield.

In addition, Lampkins scored among the top 200 individuals out of 3,753 participating students. In fact, Lampkins, who earned his B.S. degree in mathematics from CSULB, joined three UC Berkeley students as the only four California competitors ranked in the top 200. He tied among four students for 188th place.

The Putnam competition, which began in 1938, is for undergraduate students from the United States and Canada and is sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. For the contest, campuses field teams of three students, along with alternates if desired, and the six-hour exam is administered on each participating campus under the direction of a faculty advisor. This year, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Duke were the top five institutions.

As for CSULB's performance in the Putnam, Patel said, "we may get counted out as a CSU, but we've shown that we can definitely compete with the more prestigious schools this year."

All three students have a clear idea of their future career paths, especially Lampkins and Phaovibul who will be moving on from CSULB after the spring semester.

"I will be entering a Ph.D. program in the fall, possibly UCLA," Lampkins said. "I would like to study number theory and/or combinatorics. The two main career options for Ph.D.s in pure mathematics are teaching and researching, and after I get my degree, I am not sure which one I will pursue."

Phaovibul has received a full doctoral fellowship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was president of the CSULB Mathematics and Statistics Student Association and is vice president of CSULB's College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Student Council.

"My current goal is to obtain the Ph.D. in mathematics, specializing in analytical number theory," with the aim of becoming a university math professor, he said. "But, during summer, I would like to go to Africa and build houses and schools for the orphans over there."

Patel, CSULB President's Scholar, has a different career path in mind after graduation. "I'm planning on attending medical school after I graduate next year, although I may end up taking a year off to travel or work," he said.

Patel has been coaching the Mathcounts program at McAuliffe Middle School in Los Alamitos. "I actually participated in Mathcounts while I was in middle school, so it definitely feels good come full circle and work with the kids."

Congrats. I stink at math personally, but I'm glad we have people out there that don't!