In our senior year in high school we were studying for concoor and two of my classmates, Kourosh and Hamid, and we had gotten a private teacher for math. He mainly worked on multiple choice tests although occasionally would also go over the actual math concepts if it seemed like we needed it. One particular problem we once worked on was this convoluted equation where the question was how many answers does it have. The other two guys hadn’t come up with a solution so I explained what I had done. I had begun simplifying and factoring the equation and then at one point, assuming x was not 1, had divided both sides by (x-1). Some further simplification resulted in x^4 + 5x^2 = -3 and since the right side of the equation was always positive I concluded that it had no answers. At that point he showed us his solution which was different than what I had done and demonstrated that the equation in fact did have one solution. Looking over both his and my own work I realized what I had done wrong and said that my mistake was that when I divided both sides by (x-1) I didn’t consider that it would yield an answer, specifically x=1. He nodded and saidدرسته، کی گفته ایکس مخالف یکه؟ الکی از خودت قانون در می آری؟ اتفاقا که ایکس دقیقا مساوی یکه!

After he left while we waited for our rides to pick us up, as usual we started chatting amongst ourselves about anything and everything. Of course the 5 remaining pastries did not escape our attention. We each helped ourselves to one of them. Hamid then also had a second, leaving Kourosh and I to eye the remaining one, wondering which one of us would out maneuver the other in taking possession of it without being too obvious. It all amounted to nothing as while we continued talking and strategically placed ourselves in a good position to casually scoop it up, Hamid ended our pastry tug of war by taking and eating it himself.

Following our concoor I went to Sharif University.