1,600 is latest number for math wiz to ponder

By KENT FISCHER

Paul Pollack adjusts his glasses as he ponders the seemingly innocuous question just posed to him.

"Come on, Paul," his mother, Lolita, says from across the room. "Mine's seven."

Paul's father, Larry, is quick to answer too. "Eighty-seven. That's my favorite."

Paul considers the possibilities. His favorite number?

"Well, if I had to pick one, I guess it would be π + e," he says after a long pause. "I like it because nobody knows if it's a rational number or not."

Paul, 17, should know. Numbers are his specialty. In geometry, π represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, roughly 3.14. In calculus, e is the base for calculating logarithms, about 2.72. The decimals in both numbers go on to infinity. What happens when the two are added together? Nobody's ever been able to do it.

Recently, Paul earned the right to talk about another doozy of a number: 1,600. That's what he scored on the SAT college entrance test. A perfect score.

"I was surprised because I was upset with how I did on the verbal section," says Paul, a junior at Gulf High School. "I made a couple of dumb mistakes."

Paul got two questions wrong. But because some SAT questions are worth more points than others, he still scored 1,600. Eight other Florida students aced the test this year. Out of the 1.8-million students who took the exam across the country, just 458 (.04 percent) scored 1,600.

He might be the first Tampa Bay student ever to get a perfect score. Administrators in Pasco, Hernando, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties couldn't remember any of their students ever scoring 1,600. But they were not certain.

Paul's teachers say he is an outstanding all-around student, but clearly his strength is math.

The summer after seventh grade, he took algebra at Pasco-Hernando Community College and aced all the tests. He took honors geometry at Gulf High as an eighth-grader. This year, he took advanced placement Calculus BC as an independent study class. Calculus BC is a sequel to traditional calculus, only it's harder and explores things like the "Taylor Series."

"A Taylor Series is when you approximate a function using a certain number of terms in a power series," Paul says excitedly. "It's kind of hard to explain."

Next year, Paul plans to take advanced placement statistics as an independent study. Paul's teachers say they have trouble keeping up with him.

"I think he surpassed me in about the ninth grade," said Jeff Miller, a Gulf High math teacher who sponsors the math club. "He knows a lot about number theory, a topic we don't teach in high school, and one I don't know anything about."

Last summer, Paul spent six weeks at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., where he studied mathematics with 100 other gifted students. This summer, he'll attend a similar math camp at Ohio State University. Paul relishes the summer camps because they're one of the few times he's able to mingle with students who share his interest and abilities for high-powered math.

Paul's mother, Lolita, credits his teachers with sacrificing their personal time to keep her son challenged in school. Miller, for instance, takes the math team to local and state competitions. Several teachers have sponsored Paul's independent study classes and given him extra tutoring.

"Behind the scenes of every good student there is a teacher," she said.

Paul will be a senior next year, and hasn't decided where he will go to college. That decision will probably be based on which university offers the most financial aid. Eventually, he wants to attain a doctorate in math and teach at a university.

Dense mathematics texts, on loan from the University of Florida, cover Paul's bedroom dresser. They're stacked a foot high and two deep.

A dozen calculators litter his desk, most of which were won in various math competitions. Paul set up a World Wide Web page devoted to calculators and he spends much of his free time programing his Texas Instruments-92. It's a high- powered calculator that can graph problems in three dimensions.

What does he do with such a powerful calculator?

"Extended precision integer arithmetic," he says, hitting a few buttons on the monster machine that looks more like a lap top computer than a calculator. "It basically knows calculus."

Paul isn't completely absorbed by numbers. He does some normal teenager stuff, too.

Sitting on his desk among the stacks of texts and papers sits a handbook found in many teen bedrooms: the Florida driver's manual. Paul is gearing up for his driver's test.

Which does he find harder, driving or the Taylor Series?

"Oh," he says with a wave of dismissal, "the Taylor Series is easy."