Soda Is More Important Than Food (Math Adventures—Part III)

Continued from last time, where Micro had taken the last of the green tea candy (thankfully), and people started filing inside. We went through another twisty hallway, and landed in the cafeteria of what I shall call Turkey High School. It's about the same size as Paperclip's cafeteria, except it's circular (instead of the L-shape that seems to be our entire school's motif). On each table was a school's name on a piece of paper. We found our school's table, and everyone sat down, with Irving and Mario at one end and Micro, Argon, and me at the other end.

"I'm hungry," I complained. I really was hungry. I don't think I ate much for lunch.

"There are so many soda machines here," Bryant said, pointing to the soda machines scattered all over the edges of the cafeteria. "But none of them sells food."

"Really?"

"Yeah. There's one that sells ice cream though."

I went off in search of the ice cream machine, which was empty, alas. I also saw a display shelf that I assumed sold snacks, but a piece of paper taped onto the glass said "No snacks sold after 1:00." I circled around and came back to our table again to find Argon working on math packets again.

"So," Micro said, "is anyone going to teach me synthetic division?"

"Bryant," Dino said. Bryant concurred, and started writing numbers and drawing lines.

Argon chose this moment to say, "I still don't understand how you can raise e to the i."

He was referring to Euler's formula, and of course, having learned the derivation of it not a long time ago in calc, Dino said, "It's calculus."

"Oh," Argon said. "Really?"

"Yeah. Look here—" Dino pulled out a sheet of paper and started writing the Taylor series for sin x and explaining it. (Since the notation of all of this is very complicated to type without math type, I will not go in depth about the explanation. Just know that by the time Dino got to cos x, we were called down to go to our rooms to start round one.)

"Smart people on the left," the proctor who was showing us our rooms said. We took a left and went into a relatively empty room. Everyone sat down close to each other, then Micro said, "We can't sit next to people from our school."

Argon, Dino, and I, sitting in a circle-like formation around Micro, got up and moved. After I sat down again, I turned around and asked Micro, "Why did all of us move and you got to stay where you were?"

"I don't know," Micro shrugged.

We were then handed the round one questions, and someone out in the hall called the time so that everyone started and ended at the same time. The questions were all straightforward, since it was, after all, round one, and were basically counting numbers. Ten minutes went by slowly, with me playing with my pencil and checking over my work several times (not that I can usually spot anything that I've done wrong anyway).

When the proctor out the hall said that time was up, we all held our papers up to be collected. Then, I turned around (since everyone else sat behind me, as I was sitting in the very front) and compared answers with the others.

"Wait," Dino said, "the third question is six? I got five." That particular question called for counting perfect cubes that fit a certain criterion.

"Did you count twelve?" I asked. I had almost missed that one myself.

"Yeah, I counted that."

"Did you count one?" Argon asked. "That's a perfect cube."

"Oh." Dino said, realization on his face. "One."

"Hey, at least we still have a chance for 159," Argon said, referring to the "162" goal Dino had set earlier.

At this moment, someone from another school said, "The answer to the last one's five, right?"

"No, six," Micro said. "Did you count one?"

"Yeah, I counted one, two, three, two squared, and two times three..."

"What about twelve?" I asked.

"Oh, dammit! I forgot that one!"

Tricky, tricky. Well, at least we still had hope for a 159 (well, not really, and especially not really since I know what happened next, but since I'm a meanie I will tell the next time I blog.)

That's all for today, folks, and we'll see you next time! Don't forget to call our toll-free hotline, 1-800-NEPHRIA*, for any questions, concerns, or downright rants!


(*Hotline does not exist. Other methods of communication does, though.)