Charlotte Math Meetup
2024 Spring (registration closed)
Instructors: Leo Hong, Kyle Liao, Henry Lu, and Andrew Lau
Meeting time: Fridays 8:10pm ET
About CMM
CMM is a brainchild of Dr. Tao Hong during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.
On March 14, NC Governor Cooper ordered all K-12 public schools to close for at least two weeks in response to COVID-19. Dr. Hong had to take care of his kids at home while working on his already overloaded academic duties. Experiencing the chaos himself, he felt grateful for his university job, for which he has the flexibility to make up the work in the early morning before the kids wake up or at late night after putting the kids to sleep. Meanwhile, he thought other parents who work 9a-5p must be more struggling than him. He felt even bad for those kids who love math but didn't have the right resource or environment. As a forecaster, he predicted that the school closure would be way beyond two weeks. Therefore, he had the idea of hosting some online math meetups to support the local kids.
On March 21, Dr. Hong posted the following message on Nextdoor:
"I've been coaching the Math Olympiad team at Elizabeth Lane Elementary. Unfortunately due to the coronavirus, we can no longer meet in person. To help the kids get the math they want and the quality education they deserve, I would like to host some virtual meetups once or twice a week to discuss hard math problems at the level of MOEMS, MATHCOUNTS, and AMC8. I'd like to open the invitation to all math savvy kids (4th to 8th graders) near our neighborhood. If your children are interested, please send me a message with your email. If I receive requests from a wide range of students, I may break them into several groups based on their math levels. The meetups are free to join. Each student will need a computer. The students are expected to work on a few math problems for an hour or so before each meetup."
On March 23, NC Governor Cooper extended school closures statewide to May 15, 2020. In the same week, Dr. Hong hosted his first online meetup with 11 local kids, ranging from 3rd to 7th grade. The following week, the participation tripled to 33, including 32 local 3rd to 8th graders from 8 elementary schools and 5 middle schools. Due to the rapid growth in participation, Dr. Hong splitted the meetup by math level in the third week to keep up the education quality, hosting 41 students for elementary school level math and 22 students for middle school level math. Meanwhile, Dr. Hong started to record the sessions and upload them to Youtube to offer learning opportunities to a wide range of students.
On April 24, NC Governor Cooper announced that NC K-12 public schools will continue remote learning through the end of the 2019-2020 school year. The next day, Dr. Hong opened the CMM registration to friends of CMM students regardless their locations, so that CMM students have one more channel to network with their friends.
Dr. Hong continued teaching CMM sessions until the end of 2020.
In Fall 2022, CMM resumed with two young instructors Leo Hong and Kyle Liao.
In Spring 2023, Henry Lu from Ohio joined CMM as an instructor.
In Fall 2023, Andrew Lau from Texas joined CMM as an instructor.