In 2013, I pitched a story on middle school math to America’s finest magazines. I failed.

I wrote the story anyway, hoping to sell it somewhere. The most normal 1500 words wound up, unpaid, in a magazine for middle-school math teachers.

This is the rest. (With a few notes from 2026.)

 

When you reach the finals at MATHCOUNTS, you face your first level playing field.

You’ve been the best forever. Best student in your class, your school, your state. Now you’re on a stage with 11 other kids, just as best as you are.

But that’s not true. There is equality in math, but not MATHCOUNTS. It ends in a series of head-to-head competitions. 11 of you are about to be worse than someone.

The other kids don’t look as scared as you feel.

I’m in the audience, trying to impress an eighth-grader.

The average age of three members of a quartet is 57 years. What is the age of the fourth member, in years, if the quartet’s overall average age is 62 years?

David Zhu, finalist, hits the buzzer.

I’m faster. I’ve already whispered the answer to my seatmate Arjun: “77.”

“77,” Daniel announces. It’s the winning point. His opponent, Nicholas Sun, has set. Daniel advances to the round of 8.

“Nice!” says Arjun. He’s from team Virginia. He saw me taking notes, got curious, and soon became the best friend I’ve made in this place.

I needed a friend. As a student journalist, I’m used to blending in — either with students or with journalists. At MATHCOUNTS, I’m too old to compete and too young to be a teacher. I don’t fit.

This isn’t the fault of the MATHCOUNTS Foundation: they’ve been excellent hosts. Any chance for public attention, even the faint hope I represent, is unusual. The competition’s a tough sell: rustier than the Intel Talent Search, sweatier than the Scripps National Spelling Bee. No one wants to watch algebra on TV.

But even if MATHCOUNTS isn’t relevant, the kids themselves are. This is the smartest room in Washington, and Raytheon is watching. (Seriously: They’re sitting behind me.)

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“You’re good,” says Arjun.

“I remember some of my old tricks. These will get harder, though.” I write a small checkmark in my notebook. So far it’s Aaron 5, Mathletes 3. I won’t stay ahead for long.

Arjun says he wants to apply to MIT. I ask if he’s hacked anything lately. He’s plotting to get Pokémon Fire Red running on his graphing calculator.

“The emulator is Linux, and the calculator is Windows”, he says. “So I’ll probably have to pull an all-nighter to get the code right. But it’s definitely possible.”

In middle school, I went to MATHCOUNTS twice. The second time, one of my Delaware teammates finished 205th out of 224 competitors. We all thought that was pretty embarrassing. But he still made it to the Ivy League, where he studies mechanical engineering and computer science. Someday he’ll help design a car that several million people drive or an electric toothbrush that ends cavities or maybe a new missile.

For a few hundred thou, Raytheon gets three days of marketing to 250 brilliant kids. An Under Secretary of Defense stops in to give a speech about majoring in STEM: “Your country needs you.” Mathletes are pure potential energy, and someday they’ll convert it into something stronger than algebra. Who gets to use those brains?

Maybe it will be the second sponsor: Texas Instruments. I can’t imagine they need the marketing, but they paid up anyway, and gave out 250 free calculators — next to Raytheon, they’re saints.

Between rounds, I ask Arjun for his feelings on the military-industrial complex. He hasn’t noticed the vast forces tugging at his future. I decide to think about this later.¹

If m is removed at random from the set {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}, and then n is chosen at random from the remaining numbers, what is the probability that x² + 2mx + n² = 0 will have two real solutions?

In my day, I was fast. At my first Nationals, I was whispering answers to teammates at the speed of 2006 champion Daesun Yim, who is now building software at Palantir Technologies to help the government fight terrorists.²

Even today, I could beat 3 or 4 of the finalists. Back then, it would’ve been 8 or 9, had I studied hard enough to ace the written test and qualify for the “countdown round”.

It would’ve been 8 or 9, I tell myself. Respectable. But even so, I see Ashwin Sah, and I know that I was never the best. I was never even close. The U.S. military can’t have me, but if they take Ashwin, they’ll still win their wars.

On the high stage, seated behind one of the adult-size podiums, Ashwin looks to be about 4’8 and 80 pounds. He annihilates his first opponent, and though his semifinal match goes to 3-3, every point he doesn’t score feels like a stroke of misfortune in a Shakespeare comedy. The end is never in doubt.

Alec Sun, who made the finals last year and also in 2011 as a sixth-grader, is tearing up the other side of the bracket. I can’t match his pace; no more checkmarks for me.

As a “fun fact”, the moderator told the auditorium that Alec hadn’t scored a single finals point in his first two tries. But the rude anecdote doesn’t slow him down. It’s like he spent the last year meditating on a mountain instead of studying math. He had the math already, and now he has the nerves, while Hongyi Chen can barely breathe and another kid cries upon defeat.

Before long, Alec descends the mountain to face Ashwin. Now we’ll see who’s best.

David Foster Wallace once described a tennis match as “carnage of a particularly high-level sort… like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator.”

Alec and Ashwin are predators of equal size — once cheetahs, now jaguars. They stalk each other warily, buzzing in slower. These are the competition’s hardest problems, and no mistake will go unpunished.

A rhombus has sides of length 10 inches, and the lengths of its diagonals differ by 3 inches. What is the area of the rhombus, in square inches?

((x-1)! * (x+1)! )/(x!)² = 1.125. What is the value of x?

[I couldn’t transcribe this one, but it had a circle inside a square which was itself inside a circle inside a square. Someone answered before my brain could even process the problem.]

With the slower pace, I actually score a couple of points — though I need to be reckless, guessing wildly and getting some wrong. In spite of my errors, Arjun is impressed.

I’m feeling sorry for the parents, who have math genes but are thirty years removed from algebra; can they even track what’s happening?

But then, after a series of heavy blows, Alec and Ashwin are tied 3-3. Everyone understands that math: next answer wins. It’s Game 7, bottom of the ninth — and here’s the pitch!

What is the greatest integer that must be a factor of the sum of any four consecutive positive odd integers?

It’s an easy question for the finals. The boys read, think about sample digits, add those digits, and factor them in the span of four seconds. Ashwin’s hand is first to the buzzer. Fly ball, deep left field…

“Two.”

I drop my pen. Ashwin’s wrong. 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 is 16, 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 is 24, the pattern continues, and the ball falls into Alec’s glove. No mistake goes unpunished. He gets a leisurely ten seconds to check his work.

“Eight.”

When I watch the final question again on YouTube, the camera pans away from the boys’ handshake. That’s a shame: I found the handshake comforting. If the best of us couldn’t work together, we’d never have invented the electric toothbrush.

 

1. It is now later. I still haven’t thought about it much. If a company does kill me, it probably won’t be Raytheon.
2. This detail would be more ominous now. But sadly for my story, Daesun left Palantir within the year and wound up running a customer support startup.