As the Math Madness playoffs draw closer, the parish media, such as the radio and the newspaper, seem to care only about the Venomous Agendas. And for good reason: the football season of all parish schools is over. On radio the morning presenter starts with an overview of what's happening in the Southern region of the Math Madness, of the state's teams and their first opponents.
"Welcome to the special morning program on the Math Madness. For those who aren't already Venomous Agendas fans, the Venomous Agendas finished the regular season atop the Southern region. To watch also, the school of the neighboring parish, which is also in the highest bracket, but begin the playoffs as the fourteenth seed. The Majors will have a much harder beginning than the Venomous Agendas, because they will face the third seed, the Whitman High Vikings in Maryland. As for the Venomous Agendas, they will play the Georgetown Prep Hoyas, also from Maryland. Thus, our prediction is that they will pass at least three rounds and that, regardless of what happens, they will make the quarterfinals without complication. Nevertheless, if the Venomous Agendas went to the semifinals, the competition from the other three regions will be stiff, and the road to victory will have to pass through the other regions" the morning presenter delivers his announcement.
Even if the mid-Fall ranking of the state's mathletic teams compiled by the parish newspaper still feels like a joke and hoax to the eyes of some, the first 4 positions correspond to the relative positions of the state's teams at the Math Madness. The neighboring parish is by far the greatest riser in this ranking; from 11th in the pre-season ranking, it's now 2nd at mid-Fall. And, despite Lafayette having for an opponent Permian in the first round of Division 5, from the sixth seed (and probably win against it), they're now in fourth. Brother Martin remains third, even though they start the playoffs as the thirteenth seed in division 4. So the Bâton-Rouge Magnet school lost three ranks, and the other two initial members of the top-5, Benjamin Franklin (New Orleans) and the Caddo Parish Magnet School (Shreveport) are now sixth and seventh respectively.
If we disregard competition performances, the ranking seems to be highly correlated to performance on state tests and the math ACT.
"Mom, dad! The pre-ordering period has started for the promotional merchandise of the team for the playoffs!" Geneviève announces her parents with the catalog of that merchandise.
"Posters with either the players all together, the three stars together or each player individually. The rest of the merchandise is available year-round" her father describe the merchandise.
"I advise you not to get too attached to mementos from this ultimate mathletic season. The last year and a half may very well mark the town's history, high school stardom may prove painful to live after graduation" Gen then tells her parents.
"Why so?" Gen's dad, surprised by this advice, asks his daughter.
"My last reading for the AP English course seemed to talk about the dangers of hanging on too tightly to the past as a theme. One only needs to wonder what became of the Venomous Agendas pre-pandemic glories in football"
"In this case, a poster of you plus a poster of the whole team. It's the best team in Louisiana history, or at least Venomous Agendas history. I bet the price of two posters that you will win" her mother then places the family's order.
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A similar scene is happening at the shoe store with one of the employees, one of the Venomous Agendas pre-pandemic glories in football, and the cashier.
"Look at this... the town only talks about this mathematics contest! If you believe them, the Venomous Agendas can win the national title! I am ready to bet the price of your shoes that they will win" the cashier makes an informal wager on the Math Madness result.
"It reminds me my graduation year where all hopes were permitted in football before playoffs began" a clerk answers. "My prediction: they will fall in the final four, but I am not sure if it's going to be in the semifinals or the final"
"It seems like the boss' son dates the star player and that he pre-ordered a complete set of posters with the team's likenesses"
"The parish media talk about three star mathletes, but in my opinion, Marcia is the most likely to bring us back to the pre-COVID glory days"
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But at the same time as the tickets for the first playoff round are put for sale, the following announcement made by the administration snowballs, especially for those who feel the need for reinforcement in math:
"For the entire duration of the playoffs, all students in Algebra I and II, in geometry as well as in pre-calculus will be eligible for extra credit based on questions asked during playoff games. However, please be advised that the questions asked in the playoffs are on the level of the AMC-twelve, and, for the most part, are at least as difficult, if not more so, than the exam questions in the aforementioned courses" Glen, the school's principal announces before talking about the playoffs themselves. "The first game against Georgetown Prep will be held Friday night at six PM; please come to the pre-game pep rally held at the stadium, and also to watch the game livecast on the big screen!"
"These people at Georgetown Prep don't have the slightest idea of what the Venomous Agendas have in store! Further, they must not follow their mathletics team as closely as we are!" Florence, the designer of the background of the posters sold in pre-order, comments before rushing to a course.
"Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas! And answering the same questions as our mathletes will give us bonus points in our math courses?" Ted questions while the frenzy of this competition hits the town.
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In the meantime, in the neighboring parish, Brian assembles his team for a strategy meeting; they will play Whitman in the first round, it's going to be a tall order and when they start talking about what it will take for the Majors to defeat the Vikings, people start panicking.
"After reviewing Whitman's games, they are very fast, and they are good in all areas of the game. We are very slow in comparison and our only hope resides in a power outage in the Washington region. We must be faster to answer if we want to remain competitive against them!" Brian incenses his players.
"We cannot win, we are not like the Venomous Agendas! They have a home crowd; what do we have?" a player asks his teammates.
"Whitman will not have a crowd to encourage them either if it helps" Tara, the Majors' top student, points out.
"I can always bring my cheerleader girlfriend if you want"
"No thanks, I don't think it's necessary, and it won't make a difference either" Brian responds to one of his mathletes' suggestion.
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Obviously, the town's infatuation for its mathletics team goes well into its middle school. Some students of the « COVID-19 generation » already expressed, during the regular season, and even more so during the playoffs, the wish not so much to play football for the Venomous Agendas as a « career » wish in high school, but to take part in the major competitions, here defined as the Math Madness and the VMC. The number of students wishing to take part in the MOEMS (the big middle school contest, with a team that can range up to 35 mathletes but, as with the Math Madness, only takes into account a certain number of players) has simply exploded compared to last year...
But even pre-COVID, the high school math team greatly favored students in the last two years of schooling. Despite this, there is a multitude of people who want to see their favorites during the current session, which, for three mathletes on the team, is something they lived through, but only one as a team member. Today's session takes place, like the first session immediately following the victory at the state stage of the Square Root of the Answer, at the auditorium, with the team on stage. And, against all odds, the entirety of the football team, and the entirety of the middle school team for the MOEMS. With the whole team wearing the Venomous Agendas' purple and green "jersey"...
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Before the session proper begins, we will do the photo-shoot. The first picture begins with the collective picture, with the promotional posters' background designer that will take all the pictures" Trent announces, while the audiovisual manager starts preparing the practice questions.
The photo-shoot has been relatively fast. Nevertheless, some of the townsfolk that were present at the start of this meteoric rise, who knew Éliane, couldn't help themselves but to draw comparisons between Marcia and Krista, who seem poised to play an important role in the playoffs, as well as between these two girls and Éliane. Geneviève is the mathlete virtually every Venomous Agendas fan compares everyone to, teammate or opponent, past or present.
"Now that the football season is over, the reason why I brought you here is that you must keep in mind why you're here" the football head coach admonishes his players. "For seniors, your football career is now over, so there is this year left to make an effort in class!"
So, none of the seniors got an offer to play in college even as a walk-on? Randy thinks, without realizing that some of his teammates, such as Curtis, start melancholy brooding while their mind is visibly not put to the study of mathematics. And so, even if Florence is dating the wide receiver...
"Warmup question: A circle with radius log (b^2) has a circumference log (a^4). What's the logarithm in base b of a?" Trent asks the people in the room.
"We have four pi log b equal to four log a" Randy answers.
"Sir, we haven't covered the exponential and the logarithm!" the middle school students complain, whose most advanced students only start covering algebra. Including Valerie, Glen's youngest daughter, in eighth grade.
"Normally, it's in the second half of high school that we learn this" Vontae adds.
Last year, Cory was as lost into multi-variable calculus as middle school people are regarding pre-calculus today, Geneviève thinks, whose answer of pi gets out very rapidly, while she has been part of his mathematical evolution since this multi-variable calculus lecture, in this very auditorium.
That's the reason why it's the best day of my life as a Venomous Agenda; here I am seeing the crowd's gratefulness towards us, who seems to encourage us even in the absence of multi-variable calculus that made me come here for the first time. And Ted bought two posters of me in pre-order! Krista thinks, while the next question is also about logarithms and contains number theory.
"The sum of all logarithms in base ten of the divisors of ten to the n is seven hundred and ninety-two. What's n?" Trent asks the second question.
"To begin, the product of the divisors of a number a is equal to a to the number of divisors divided by two. Yet, the divisors of ten to the n can all be written as two to the x times five to the y, x and y each going from zero to n, then we have ten to the n plus one squared over two, and the answer is eleven" Krista blurts the whole solution.
"Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas!" the wide receiver shouts after hearing the solution.
"Oh?" Daisy, Curtis' little sister asks, who is on the middle school's mathletics team. "Is there anything I missed?"
"The logarithm of a product is equal to the sum of logarithms" Marcia explains, "but is also the exponent of a number that can be expressed under the form n to the x, here the x in the present case"
"After the end of the session, we will let the members of the team answer the public's mathematical questions" Trent announces. "That said, we expect the hardest questions on the Math Madness to be more or less of the level of the following question"
"Ouch: is that the kind of questions that will be asked on the road to victory? Multi-variable calculus or that, I wonder what will be worse" Ted asks his girlfriend on stage.
"Yes. That's why we are showing some of them. Let B be a set of binary numbers that have exactly five zeros and eight ones. If all the possible subtractions are made between two elements of B, find the number of times that one is returned as a result" Trent asks a third question.
"To have one as a result, we need one of the two numbers to end by one and zero, and the second number must not end like this. There are four zeros and seven ones left to distribute and therefore the number of combinations of seven in eleven" Vontae explains, with some in the audience that are surprised to see him answer the question.
Or 330. But, at the end of the session, Cory meets with Florence with a count of the pre-orders recorded for the tournament's posters, with the safety deposits.
"Florence, look at this: the five best sellers make up the bulk of the sales. So please hurry in making all posters and we send that to the printing press" Cory instructs Florence.
"Seriously, the town has ordered several full sets?" asks a surprised Florence. "Before we begin, I would like to know the following: how can we have z to the thirteen equal to w and at the same time w to the eleven equal to z, without z being equal to plus or minus one? All that I understood about this question is we have z to the one hundred and forty-three equal to z, thus z to the one hundred forty-two is equal to one. But you claim that z is not equal to plus or minus one; how come?"
"It's a complex number question, Moivre's theorem says that we can express z under the form e to the i-thêta. If we have z to the one hundred and forty-two equal to one, the imaginary part can be expressed as i times sin of two pi k over one hundred forty-two, and the real part is cos of the same angle. This season complex numbers came back several times" Cory explains to her.
"Excuse me; my boyfriend, Curtis, is in pre-calculus too and he hasn't seen complex numbers in class yet, and I didn't either" Florence makes her excuses.
The shoe store and the grocery both also ordered a complete set, and the school bought several kits, of which one is to be used exclusively by the mathematics department, but most Venomous Agendas fans just bought one or two posters. As for the rest of the school's merchandise, the residual stock of pennants and stickers is finally sold; not even last year's drive to the SRA final resulted in that many sales of this merchandise.
But it forced the school to buy a multi-variable calculus textbook, as well as a few other college-level mathematics books, and the library thus spent nearly a thousand dollars for these books.
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Upon her return home, Geneviève trembles like a leaf in front of her parents around the dinner table:
"I don't even know what to think of this competition; am I risking my collegiate future on the playoffs of this math league?" Gen asks her parents, prone to anxiety.
"Why are you saying this? I don't think so. It's your reputation in the town that's at stake instead in this competition. You know the town expects that you bring the Venomous Agendas to victory on the national stage once again. You also know that, until this year, no one expected our school to win on the national stage, no one expected our state to win mathletically" Gen's mom asks her back.
"For as enthusiastic this town might be, you know the public hasn't tasted mathletic defeat since the beginning of this mad adventure. We have always been here for you, long before the Square Root of the Answer was the turning point" Gen's dad continues.
"I hope that you're ready should we lose; the radio presenter, this morning, said we can go all the way but effectively doing so will require great wins against the best schools. You know that the best schools will have several mathletes like you" Gen's mom sermons her daughter.
"It's Vontae that has the most to lose from a playoff loss. He still has one year of competition and the pressure will be on him next year. He must prove himself and to show the universities that he has what it takes mathematically. But let's hope that it doesn't happen" Gen then prays.
"I simply remember that you asked us, before the SRA final, not to hold it against you should you lose" her father then remembers that warning.
"In any other town, mathletes are not followed by the population like movie or football stars. The AMC-twelve is next week but we are training concurrently for both, and no one in town talks about that" Gen points out to her parents.
"Honey, I know you're obsessed by this competition... you dragged the town with you. You treat physics problems as you do competition problems!" Gen's mom then sermons her daughter again.
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With the windfall coming from the sale of promotional merchandise, as well as from the regular season math games, Cory organizes an extraordinary meeting of the booster club as treasurer and fundraising manager of the mathletics team. The various administrators and boosters have several proposals about the use of the money drawn from the town's infatuation for its high school's math team:
"First, we would like to redistribute the cash of the past few months to the other two academic extracurricular teams" Cory's father announces.
"But we should not neglect the sudden excitement of the town about mathematics and the municipal library is out of books on this topic. We want to have a lasting impact, but the town cannot afford to buy a whole lot" the club administrator that had Gen do his taxes in April continues.
"It will take at least one copy of every book used for school purposes by the various schools of the town, as well as special books used for mathletics purposes" Cory adds.
"The town's mathematical collection should contain, at a minimum, the sum of the mathematical collections of its schools. Even though I'm there as a representative of the debate team, if possible, we should also have books on the art of rhetoric applied to debates, and books on logic" Florence adds. "It's there that the town starts seeing the advantage of a better education, but the successes of our mathletics team make it so that people obsess over mathematics. If there's cash remaining after that, arts should have some of it too"
"Flo, I understand your viewpoint, after all not everyone can do math on the level of our cherished mathletes. We should be able to fit in a few books on rhetoric, oratory arts and logic relatively inexpensively, but our current budget assumes we will be eliminated in the first round. So any contribution to arts must wait until a subsequent round" the basketball team representative points out.