Image Courtesy of TOMAS GONZALEZ '26
YI POSING with his Integration Bee trophy
On March 25, 2025, Jacob Yi ‘26 beat Matteo Gacina ‘25 in the 2nd Annual Loyola Integration Bee, a competition between AP Calculus AB classes (taught by Alex Lanza and Susan Torales) to determine which AB student is the best at solving integrals. Yi’s victory took him two weeks of solving complex integrals using methods like U-substitution, which he learned in Chapter 5 of Calc AB.
In order to finish the Bee and defeat Gacina, Yi had to get through Michael Krieger ‘26 in the quarterfinals and Adrian Martin ‘25 in the semifinals. The competition brought out the competitive nature of all eight math scholars who qualified for the Bee and sparked a friendly challenge between the two teachers and their classes.
The Loyola Integration Bee was inspired by MIT’s Integration Bee, a competition of a similar nature. MIT’s Bee has students sign up to solve complex integrals in a one-on-one single-elimination tournament. MIT’s Bee contains more complex, college-level integrals that require methods to solve that AB students haven’t learned. For Loyola’s Bee, eight students participated;, with four being selected from Lanza’s periods of AB and four from Torales’. They then fought in a single-elimination tournament, with seeding determined by the Bee’s qualifying exam. During the Integration Bee weeks, a myth spread among AB students that Torales had a five–year winning streak, which would have meant that Yi’s win was the first in a while for Lanza.
However, Lanza himself debunked this and said, “This was actually only the second ever Integration Bee at Loyola.” The finals of the Bee lasted nine rounds (and nine integrals). Since the previous integrals were too hard for both Gacina and Yi, the score was 1-1. Round 9’s integral was designed to be easy in order to end the game, and the answer was simply 30. However, Yi reacted faster than Gacina and wrote down the answer first to take home the victory.
Lanza said that throughout the tournament, “[Yi] did an excellent job, and while all students were competitive, he was a little faster in the final rounds getting him the victory.” As a lower-ranked seed, Yi pulled off three upsets to win the tournament, since he was lower than Krieger, Martin and Gacina.
In order to pull off such a feat of in-
tegration, Yi said, “I prepared a lot with
my friends—they helped me find prob-
lems that were quite difficult to solve and
prepared me for many hard situations.”