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
The Tel Aviv University team obtained the highest
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.
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.
| Grade | Content Domain | Instructional Hours |
| Grade 7 | Algebra | 70 |
| Numbers | 30 | |
| Geometry | 50 | |
| Grade 8 | Algebra | 70 |
| Numbers | 50 | |
| Geometry | 30 | |
| Grade 9 | Algebra | 65 |
| Numbers | 15 | |
| Geometry | 70 |
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
