Trinity Rihner, 2025 Iowa Voyager Cohort
At the beginning of the Harry Potter book series, Harry discovers he is a wizard only when a mysterious letter is delivered to his home. Something similar happened to Trinity Rihner.
Trinity, now 10 and entering fifth grade in Denison, Iowa, had always done well in school. Her grades were high, she’d been placed in her school’s Extended Learning Program, and she breezed through her classwork. But no one – including Trinity herself – knew just how unique her talents were. Then a letter from the district superintendent arrived. Unfortunately, it was not delivered by an owl.
The letter said that the Iowa state assessment results placed her in the top two percent in math for the state. Because of National Math Stars’ partnership with the Iowa DOE, Trinity received a letter saying she’d been nominated for NMS.
Like many good things that turn up unexpectedly, the nomination initially sparked skepticism among the Rihners. “I was like, is this real? Is this a scam?” recalls Trinity’s mother, Alyssa, laughing. “They want some of our information and then they’ll give you scholarship opportunities? You just have to be cautious.” A little research convinced them that National Math Stars was the real deal. They applied and were accepted.
This turn of events surprised Trinity as much as anyone. “My grades have always been fairly high,” she says. “I just didn’t expect to get into a special program. But it was really exciting.”
In hindsight, the signs were there early. Alyssa, a former ESL teacher, knew the typical milestones and had seen her daughter blow past them. Trinity was an early reader, and by age two she was skip-counting up to 100. Math runs in the family, too: her dad, Marcus, majored in math in college and both parents competed in math competitions growing up. “We enjoy math in our house,” Alyssa says, “but I wouldn’t say we strove to find curriculum or extras to advance Trinity’s math. This was a good push.”
It was good timing too. Before National Math Stars entered the picture, school math had started to drag. “We would learn the same thing for, like, three weeks, and I caught on to it the first two days,” Trinity says. Now, through a self-paced Beast Academy course set up by NMS, she’s working more than a year ahead of grade level, diving into pre-algebra, fractions, decimals, and exponents. “I really like being able to go my speed,” she says. “Not staying on the same thing, or moving too fast for me.”
The opportunities have multiplied quickly. In her first year as a Star, Trinity placed third in Iowa and ninth in the nation at Math Kangaroo, and her team, which included her friend and fellow Star, Brielle, took first in the Midwest in GAIM (Girls’ Adventures in Math). She attended two summer camps, including the National Math Stars camp in Austin, where campers built platonic solids out of balloons and Trinity got to meet and connect with other stars in person. “Sometimes when you stay with the same people your whole life, you don’t really get to have new connections,” she says. “I liked getting to meet new people.”
Trinity’s talents don’t stop at math. She loves dance and gymnastics (tumbling especially), as well as sketching mesmerizing geometric designs and reading long book series like Harry Potter and The 39 Clues. With her NMS STEM budget, she bought a 3D printer and taught herself Tinkercad, designing a model of a mountain pass from her family’s trips to Colorado.
For Alyssa, who now volunteers as an NMS parent lead, the program uncovered something that might otherwise have stayed hidden. “It was amazing to be gifted resources that we probably wouldn’t have been able to provide,” she says. “She has a lot of potential, and this gives us opportunities to grow that potential.”
Everyone’s excited to see what Trinity will do with her magic in the coming years.
