"80, that's definitely a solid B." (Math Adventures—Part IV)

Continued from last time, where we had just finished round one and were going on to round two, but since this has been drawn out for so, so long, I will effectively condense round two and round three (during which Mario and Tybalt tried to find what room Argon and I were in, but failed because they didn't turn around and see me), and this latest edition will begin as Argon, Micro, Dino and I were all back in the cafeteria (basically after round four, so Mario and Tybalt have gone off to do round five).

"How are we doing now?"

"Round two was brutal. We got six points—Treeburg got twenty."

"There's no way Treeburg got twenty points," Dino said, standing up to go over to the score-projector. We followed him and confirmed this sad reality, and then came back to our table again.

"So, there goes 159," Micro said.

"159?" Dino asked, feigning confusion (I was pretty sure he was feigning, because he went on to ask "confusedly" what 162 was, when he was the person who first brought it up).

"Hey, Micro," I said. "Take 162 and multiply it by 0.8 on your calculator."

Micro punched in some numbers and said, "129.6."

"Okay, that's our new goal. 130."

"Why?" Argon asked. "What's 130?"

"That will give us a solid B."

"That's not a solid B," Dino said. "That's a low B."

"80 is definitely a solid B. In the grand scheme of grade-keeping, it doesn't matter what's added to the B at the end."

"Whatever." Dino chose to go back to explaining cos x as a Taylor polynomial to Argon, then added the two together to form the Taylor polynomial of e. After some fiddling and manipulation of numbers, he circles the final result—a degenerate Euler's formula, without the one or zero.

"Whatever," Dino said again as I pointed out his lack of zeros.

"I get how you derived it," Argo said, "but I don't understand how you can take something to the i power. I mean, what does that mean? How do you do it?"

"Well," Dino said. "It just is. You don't ask 'how.'"

Skimming over more trivial events (Micro, Argon, and I testing out more suspicious gelatin-marshmallow candy flavors, Mario claiming that we may still have a chance against Treeburg after seeing their dismal round four scores, and Bryant wondering if he should sneak in a TI-89—not allowed, but unlikely that the proctors would see the difference between that and a TI-84, which is allowed—for the team round questions), this final installment of Math Adventures sees us about to hear who the winners for the state match are. Half the schools (those who figured they would never make top three anyway) had already left, but of course we were not concerned about them. All we cared about was whether we had defeated Treeburg or not.

"And now, in second place for the large schools—"

"If we win," Dino said, "I am going to scream."

"—Paperclip High School!"

Well, so much for hearing him scream. Since the next part(s) is boring, I shall fast forward it. Basically people got their trophies (if any), got on the bus, made lots of noise, Ms. Sherbert asked "all the Paperclip kids to count off and see if everyone's here," to which Mario responded, rather immediately despite his poor view in the back, that yes, we were all here, and then we got back to school. As you can probably see, I have kind of forgotten all the details.

Nevertheless. There is math team tomorrow. The adventures continue!

(UPDATE: Our team made it to the top twelve in the Moody's challenge! YAY! We get a scholarship prize of $1500, which I have no idea how it's going to be even given to us, but nonetheless, top twelve! That is so amazing. As a side note, I am surprised that the Mario-Irving-Owen-Tybalt-Bryant team did not do as well as ours (although they made honorable mention), seeing as their paper seemed much more mathematically based, and ours lacked a conclusion. Perhaps we were so amazing that they overlooked those minor details.

Or so I'd like to believe.)