Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Tel Aviv U. Students Take first Place in International Math Competition

i24NEWS and ILH Staff                 

Nadene Goldfoot                                   

Israeli students from Tel Aviv University took first place in international math competition for University Students (IMC).  The event took place in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, from August 1-7 with the participation of nearly 600 students from all over the world. Illustration: Getty Images/Fuse


The Tel Aviv University team obtained the highest 

group score (292.5 points), ahead of students from 

major universities such as Cambridge (England), 

Polytechnique (France), University of Bonn 

(Germany), University of Amsterdam 

(Netherlands), University College London 

(England), Eötvös Loránd University of Hungary 

and University of Barcelona in Spain.


The TAU delegation included eight students from the 

School of Mathematics: Shvo Regavim, Noam 

TaShma, Lior Hadassi, Shahar Friedman, Lior Shain, 

Dror Frid, Tommy Winetraub and Uri Kreitner. The 

team members were accompanied by their coaches, 

Dr. Dan Carmon and Dor Mezer from the 

university’s School of Mathematical Sciences.


“We are very proud of our students who won first 

place in the International Student Mathematics 

Competition. The investment, commitment and 

pursuit of excellence of the team members and their 

coach, Dr. Dan Carmon, are worthy of great 

admiration,” said Prof. Yaron Ostrover, director of 

the school, and Prof. Yehuda Shalom, team 

coordinator, in a congratulatory statement.

“The School of Mathematics of Tel Aviv University 

considers the training of the future generation to lead 

Israel’s science and technology research and industry 

as an absolute priority”, the pair continued.

“This impressive achievement once again expresses the global 

academic power of Israel in general and of Tel Aviv University in 

particular in mathematics. Congratulations also to our colleagues 

from other Israeli universities for their good results,” they added.

“We competed against the best math students in the world and it’s a 

great honor for us to have won first place,” said Carmon, math team 

coach and engineer at StarkWare.



Flying from Israel to Bulgaria (in red) the 8 students, thanks to 

StarkWare. 


“I congratulate all the Israeli participants for their excellent 

performance. The competition required a set of skills from the 

students: high mathematical knowledge, high level of resistance to 

pressure and creativity. I am sure that the tools they acquired during 

the competition will also be useful in the future. I would also like to 

thank my colleagues at StarkWare who have helped us a lot in 

financing the costs of the expedition,” he concluded.  



StarkWare Industries is an IsraelI software company in 

the Cryptography field. It develops zero-knowledge 

proof technology that compresses information in order to 

address the scalability problem of the blockchain, and works 

on the Ethereum platform. In May 2022 the company's 

estimated value was $8 billion, an increase from $2 billion six 

months earlier.  


There were no entrants from the USA listed.  The USA top math 

universities are:  Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, MIT in 

Cambridge, Stanford in Stanford, CA, and U of California in 

Berkeley, CA.                          


The school curriculum of lower grades develops these math students 

who can win contests.  Israel, in 2009, had great plans.  

                                             

     Albert Einstein, at 21,  was a great mathematician.  He was born 

on 14 March 1879 in Germany, a good example for college math 

students. 

In 2009 in Israel , a new mathematics curriculum was developed at the lower secondary level. The curriculum integrates the mathematical knowledge learned in primary school with new and more advanced topics in lower secondary school, and uses a spiral approach to curricular planning to expand on topics previously taught. The spiral sequencing allows students to return to basic ideas as new subjects continually, and concepts are added over the course of a curriculum in order to solidify understanding over periodic intervals. The curriculum merges three domains—Numbers, Algebra, and Geometry—and cultivates student ability to use multidomain problem solving methods. The new curriculum is intended to include at least 150 instructional hours in each grade, and includes recommendations concerning the allocation of instructional hours to help teachers with planning. The allocation of instructional hours for mathematics content domains is presented in Exhibit 1.

Exhibit 1: Instructional Hours for Mathematics, Grades 7–9

That's 150 hours  each year of math in the 7th , 8th and 9th grades. 

There are about 52 weeks in a year, and usually June, July and August are not spent in school, so 12 weeks can be eliminated, leaving  40 school weeks from 9am to 3pm 5 days a week, only in Israel, school is 6 days a week with Saturday off.  Usually Math at jr high level would have 45 minute classes every day, I would think.  They would also have math homework as well, adding more hours of math for reinforcement.  Incidentally, everyone has problems with story problems. 

GradeContent DomainInstructional Hours
Grade 7Algebra70
Numbers30
Geometry50
Grade 8Algebra70
Numbers50
Geometry30
Grade 9Algebra65
Numbers15
Geometry70


This article was first published by i24NEWS.

https://www.israpundit.org/israeli-students-take-first-place-in-international-math-competition/

https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/encyclopedia/countries/israel/the-mathematics-curriculum-in-primary-and-lower-secondary-grades/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarkWare_Industries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

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