12th Grade Mathematics Competition
The Text
There is an Israel-wide mathematics competition for teams of 4 high-school students from the same high school. During the 12th grade, I was assigned in charge of forming the team, but many of my classmates whom I perceived as bright and mathematically inclined, did not want to go. That was possibly given the competition was hosted in the Technion in Haifa, whereas we lived and studied in Tel Aviv (so the participants had to commute to there and back and also miss a pedagogical study day and need to catch up from a classmate).
I ended up travelling to the Technion by trains and buses with two other students (called Ido and Esther) and as we were only able to solve 3 problems out of the 9 in the competition’s problems’ sheet, we did not place. However, we could take our copies of the sheets home with us, and so my classmates and I tried to find solutions for the remaining problems.
Eventually, I, with some assistance from my friends and classmates, was able to solve all the problems in the sheet, except for one, which was a a geometrical ones. Moreover, Esther claimed she came up with different solutions to some of the problems we had solved, that she wrote on paper pages at her home, .