Weeks turned into months. The PDF became worn in the digital sense—bookmarks, highlights, a folder of handwritten notes titled “Zbirka_Killing_Spree.” Luka discovered that the hardest problems often had the most elegant solutions. He discovered that asking for help was not weakness. He discovered that the satisfaction of solving a problem after forty-five minutes of frustration was better than any video game level-up.
“Why do I need this?” he whispered to the empty room. “I’m never going to use a quadratic equation to order pizza.”
Luka read it twice. Then, something strange happened. He didn’t suddenly become a math prodigy. But he stopped seeing the PDF as an enemy. He saw it as a map of a dark forest, and every solved problem was a tiny lantern.
And for the first time, the numbers felt less like a foreign language and more like an old, difficult friend.
(Collection of Mathematics Problems for 9th Grade)
He had never read the foreword. He scrolled back. The author, a retired professor named Dr. Vera Horvat, had written a small note:
Luka was good at many things. He could name every dinosaur that ever appeared in Jurassic Park , assemble a computer from spare parts in under an hour, and recite the offside rule in three languages. But mathematics? Mathematics was a foreign country where he did not have a visa.
That night, he emailed his mother a single line: “Tell Aunt Mira to send me the PDF for 10th grade. I think I’m ready.”
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