If you’re hungry and fancy a slice of pi, then RI Mathematics Club should add some spice to your dreary life. If you were walking in Bishan Park and notice the natural logs and trees with roots, then you ought to join our fun club. If you can dance to some algo-rhythm, that’s a good sine that you should join the club.

With such a wide variety of CCAs to choose from in RI, you might find yourself at a node with far too many possible paths to take. However, by choosing to read this article out of a group of others, you have compounded your interest in RI Mathematics Club, and hence, here we are to distribute some of the properties of this CCA, hoping to increase the odds of you union-ing with this wonderful club.

Simply put, we are for those who think decimals have a point, or even for those who might still be nonplussed about addition. You don’t need to be a brilliant mathematician to join our club. You just need a good sense of humour and maybe a little positivity. Even if you find calculus to be a little too derivative, or even if you aren’t that partial to fractions, it’s perfectly all right! In other words, there really are no prerequisites or selection process to joining this CCA.

RI Mathematics Club sessions are held periodically, once a week, allowing members to average out their workload and other commitments easily. Contradicting the popular belief, the club does not spend sessions just training for competitive Math. Indeed, being a student-planned CCA, RI Mathematics Club diverges from your run-of-the-mill CCA by commonly having a wide range of interactive activities, from Math games to members’ presentations on interesting Math topics. In the words of member Shijian (14S06Q): “RI Mathematics Club is an explosion of fun and enrichment!”

Of course, complementing these fun activities, we have serious training sessions too, especially before competitions. In these sessions, we aim to equip you with the essential techniques and mathematical rigour required in competitive Math, raising your Math ability to a higher power.

With the inclusion of these techniques in your array of skills, your possibilities to represent RI in Math competitions are unbounded! Our major competition, the Singapore Mathematical Olympiad (SMO), is held on a yearly interval in June. However, tangential to this, there are many other competition opportunities such as the Shanghai TI Cup Math Contest, the American Mathematics Contest (AMC), and the Australian Mathematics Competition (AMC). Being an intellectual CCA, going for such competitions add to the cognitive domain of your Raffles Diploma, not to mention the distinct track record of RI Mathematics Club when it comes to such competitions.

RI Mathematics Club is also an element of the Raffles Science Alliance (RSA), which comprises the 6 science CCAs in RI. We thus also have a function to help organize the annual RSA events, comprising RSA week, RSA inter-house competition, as well as “Eureka!”, a science competition for secondary school students.

While the above outlines the physical/material subset of what RI Mathematics Club does, the experience of this CCA is a lot more integrated. Joining RI Mathematics Club means joining a family. We don’t just have CCA together: we have meals, go out, and share experiences that surpass the limit of CCA hours. We even have an annual camp with the Math Clubs of RI(Y1-4) and RGS, the Raffles Mathematics Circle Combined Camp (RMCCC), to forge closer friendships. As chairperson Michelle (14S03P) puts it, “RI Mathematics Club is so close knit, it is more of a family than a CCA”. If you ever find yourself at odds with others, the people from Mathematics Club can always even things out for you.

Factoring in these information that we present, we urge you to reflect on your true passions and converge to a rational decision. And it’s okay to think about it for a while, cos we’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

Hint: To help you converge, RI Mathematics Club presents “Mathernoon”, a fun- and math-filled day (or afternoon) specially for you to get a glimpse of how we are like. J1s and upper secondary students (as of 2014) are all welcome.

Interested? Please sign up here at tinyurl.com/mathernoon!

[The author wishes to apologise for the numerous lame puns in the article, but if you enjoyed reading these puns as much as I did writing them, seriously, RI Mathematics Club is for you :D]