Though they are inseparable today, there was no love at first sigh when Roger Fan and Steve Zhang met.

“I met him at a math competition in middle school,” Fan said. “You should have seen the pictures of him back then. You would have thought, ‘Oh, yeah, this guy’s a nerd.’”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Fan and Zhang began to talk online, as they were part of the same math competitions.

“We did some competitions together for Gunn Math Circle because it was being run by other people,” Fan said. “We just tagged on for competitions. And then in sophomore year, we talked more. We did a lot of random math things together.”

Fan and Zhang’s overlapping interests and activities helped forge their friendship. Today, the two serve as co-presidents of Gunn Math Circle Club, organizing the Gunn Math Competition, writing problems to select competition team members and hosting weekly lunch meetings.

“One thing we do for Math Circle is just run a bunch of events,” Fan said. “We run a math camp over the summer for middle-schoolers to get people into math. We ran the Gunn Math Competition too, and that was a lot of work and also a lot of fun.”

Zhang finds his partnership with Fan effective and rewarding.

“As a person, Roger is really ambitious and on top of things all the time,” Zhang said. “So it’s nice to have a partner like that who can sort of keep me in check.”

Fan and Zhang continue to spend time with each other, even outside of math-related activities.

“We do so much stuff together, it’s impossible for us to not be friends,” Fan said. “We sometimes do homework together, and sometimes we just chill.”

Fan finds his friendship with Zhang fulfilling and sees their notoriety on campus as an additional bonus.

“We’re like a power couple, a power dynamic,” Fan said. “That’s us.”