URBANA — Uni's MathCounts team won the Champaign County Chapter regional competition Feb. 14 at Everitt Lab on the University of Illinois campus.

The team consisted of subfreshmen Edo Roth, Chelsea Edwards, Henry Carlton, and Max Sigalov. Yulun Wu was the highest-ranked alternate competitor.

All five students will travel with coach Gene Bild on March 7 to the state competition in Matteson.

Last year's team placed second at the regional contest, with Kathy Qiu and Kathleen Kohl advancing to the state tournament. Qiu finished in the top 25 percent at state, No. 50 overall.

MathCounts is a national mathematics coaching and competition program for middle school students.

Illinois, which has one of the largest MathCounts programs in the country, won the 2004 national championship with the help of then-Uni subfreshman Alex Zhai, who graduated in 2008 and is now a freshman at Harvard.

Zhai went on to represent the United States three times at the International Mathematical Olympiad, tying for first place at last summer's IMO.

Each MathCounts competition consists of:

• a sprint round (40 minutes for 30 questions, calculators not permitted)
• a target round (about 30 minutes; eight problems presented in four pairs, each set of problems requiring several steps, calculators allowed)
• a team round (20 minutes; 10 problems that team members work together to solve, calculators allowed)
• a countdown round (a fast-paced oral competition in which top-scoring individuals square off against each other and the clock, with 45 seconds to come up with a correct answer, calculators not permitted)

The Illinois Society of Professional Engineers sponsors the state program, which has about 270 schools in 20 local chapters. Since the program began in 1983, more than 7 million students have participated nationwide.