Gaza teenagers defy war for math competition

Karam Al-Kurd was an unlikely candidate to win the Palestinian Mathematical Olympiad.

The home of a 17-year-old boy in Deir el-Balah, central area. Gazawas handed over to several evacuated relatives over the past year. The family often eats little except canned food. The solar energy is barely enough to charge the phone, which Al-Kurd uses when he can to continue his studies.

He was unable to attend competition preparation courses; Since his school was closed due to the Israeli attack, he learned to solve complex math problems with the help of his older brother and a few textbooks.

Those efforts paid off when his first place finish in the five-hour online test earned him a place at the international finals in the UK this July, along with teams from 108 other countries.

This would be his first time leaving Gaza.

“He was an untapped talent,” said Samed Al-Hajjajla, the 25-year-old team leader for the Palestinian International Mathematical Olympiad.

Maths competitions can seem esoteric, especially in the war-torn territory where many young people dropped out of school before the conflict closed educational institutions.

Academic youth must now juggle their attempts to continue their studies with dodging heavy ammunition, finding clean water to drink, and passing checkpoints.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel last year provoked warIsrael’s offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 43,000 people and left much of the strip in ruins, displacing almost its entire population, according to local health authorities.

But Al-Hajjajla, who was the driving force behind Palestine’s first Olympic bid in 2022, is determined not to let the war stop young Palestinians from achieving academic success at the highest level.

“You can know all the theories and laws. That’s not what this is about. It’s about creative, critical thinking — thinking outside the box,” he said.

“Getting people to think correctly, to think abstractly, that’s what problem solving is all about. Then you can create solutions and models that can be applied to anything.”

Over its 65-year history, the IMO has been a springboard for some of the world’s brightest young mathematical minds, including about half of all Fields medalists.

six questions The annual final competition takes students well beyond their school level. Solving just one problem earns an honorable mention that opens doors to top universities.

Al-Hajjajla returned from London, where he worked as a software engineer at Meta, to the West Bank last year to train students for IMO and its computer science equivalent through his social enterprise Meshka. This year, almost 1,000 young people aged 14 to 18 applied for the free program.

The four selected for the 2024 team, including Al-Kurd, received intensive training through Zoom calls with Palestinian and international mathematicians.

Hassan Saleh, 17, was only able to join a few sessions over the phone he shares with six family members. He fled his home in Gaza City a week after the war began.

“I left behind all the tools – a laptop, a calculator, math notes and even some problems I came up with,” he said. A month passed before he was able to access the Internet again.

He reached the final despite having to run four times in the past year, once with “bombs literally flying over us.”

But the closure of the Rafah crossing into Egypt in May meant he and al-Kurd did not even apply for British visas because they knew they had no chance of leaving the Gaza Strip.

The remaining two team members, living in the West Bank, had planned to travel to the UK, but their passports and approved visas disappeared in transit somewhere between the British consulate in Jerusalem, the embassy in Tel Aviv and the printers in Abu Dhabi.

It is still unclear what happened; The IMO Ethics Committee is investigating.

It was a heavy blow for the team, which had hoped to win its first medal.

Al-Hajjajla believes the IMO should have taken alternative measures, such as allowing students to compete online. “If this were Ukraine, I think they would allow it,” he said.

Gregor Dolinar, president of the IMO, said he and the board “were hoping until the last moment that we would be able to come.” He said they would work to ensure teams affected by the conflict could compete next year in Australia, including through online access or financial assistance.

Saleh now lives in a tent in an area that Israel has designated as a “humanitarian zone” and which continues to be hit by numerous airstrikes. He would like to take part in the Olympiad again, but studying was difficult. It took him months to enroll in the online school.

“It’s been a year since I’ve had any formal education,” he said.

Al-Kurd is trying to complete his last two years of school online. He spends most of his free time studying topics such as calculus, number theory and logic, and taking a university course on his smartphone.

Al-Kurd, the son of a lawyer and a housewife, is rare among Gazans to stay in his home. But like most of the territory’s inhabitants, he lost members of his extended family in the war, losses he doesn’t want to discuss.

He was unable to accept a scholarship offer from a school in India this fall, but hopes to apply to a university abroad next year—perhaps Stanford or MIT.

“Fear and uncertainty about the future sometimes make it difficult to concentrate,” he said. “Math helped me a lot because it separated me from terrible situations and encouraged me to stop thinking about the war and focus on what I love to do.”

He added: “When you study mathematics, you want to learn more so you can see the big picture.”

According to Al-Hajjajly, the big picture is inspiring an entire generation. He wants to create training programs in every Palestinian city.

“It is very important to improve problem-solving skills for Palestinian children because they are the future and they lack so much,” he said.

“Our education system is not very good. We now have examples of (former) students getting internships at Facebook and Google or receiving scholarships at the best universities in the world.

“If we can scale this to the whole country, Palestine will be a different place.”