Interview with Mohammad El-Mir

Mohammad El-Mir (representing Lebanon) is one of the top Mental Math prodigies of the past few years, winning his age category in the Junior Mental Calculation World Championship 5 times since 2014, often by hundreds of points!

In this interview we catch up with him soon after his first appearance in the 15+ age category of the JMCWC, where he emphatically won the silver medal.

How and when did you first get involved in competitive mental calculation?

My father tells me that he had found some early intelligence signs, most notably a good memory. I was raised in a conservative family and I was able to memorize a few lines from the Qur’an at the age of about 18 months after only hearing it a few times while my father was praying.

Then at a family visit in 2011 or 2012, I saw my relative’s daughter calculating very fast with small numbers, but bigger than those I used to do sometimes with my father. And that was what made me register at a local soroban learning center.

After a while, I started winning local competitions, and won a trip to a mental calculations training camp in Japan in 2013. At the time I could only do additions and subtractions. In Japan I learned multiplications.

Then I participated at another local competition in 2014. The prize for the competition was a trip to a competition in South Africa. But I was up against a girl a couple of years older than me (and probably better), and finished second and lost the trip. It was a very hard day for me as a young child.

And what happened after that?

A few months later, Caroline Merkel, the organizer of the JMCWC, saw a picture of me in Japan that my mother had posted on Twitter, and invited me to participate at the 2014 JMCWC. It was near the beginning of the summer.

Then we discovered the sample questions which were way above my level. I could barely at the time do 3 digits additions and 2 digits by 1 or 2 digit multiplications, so I had to make a great effort in order to do tasks as high as 4 digits by 4 digits multiplications which were very very hard for me at the time. I remember how I used to cry while doing fractions. Though I can probably do these tasks in no time now, I do remember how much hard it was for me. The discovery of a media report about an Indian team that would be participating made me more stressed.

However I went to Germany and won the first place with 1455 points with the second placed scoring 1121. The funny thing is that the local center (which I left shortly after winning my first title in Germany) cancelled its trip to South Africa because of the Ebola there, so had I won the trip, I wouldn’t probably have gone to Germany at all!

What’s your favourite memory from your career so far in mental calculation?

My best memory was definitely finishing first at the 2016 JMCWC.

On October 3rd 2016, I competed in the Juniors 2 category for the first time, and was facing Wenzel Grüß for the first time. I did the test paper, ate lunch in a few minutes, then went directly to the University of Bielefeld with Jan van Koningsveld where I set a new Memoriad world record in Flash Anzan. A team filming for a German TV show (Klein Gegen Groß) kept us some more time at the university to do some interviews, and even followed us to the award ceremony.

The best thing out of that exhausting day was hearing Jan van Koningsveld saying in the ceremony: “Silver goes to…. Wenzel Grüß!” I was the only name left and won gold, and it was a really great feeling. Wenzel got his revenge this year, but I’m yet to give up!

How do you train for competitions? How do you prepare for events?

Well for the first local events my parents used to write questions by hand. Then we discovered in 2014 that there are some worksheets online, so most of my training since 2015 is on George Lane’s Pegasus software. In the last few years I’ve been a bit too lazy to train on anything except the actual questions I have, but that should change.

I used to have continuous training almost everyday in the Summer with an average of 3 hours per day in 2015, 4 hours in 2016 and 2 hours in 2017. I didn’t train a lot in 2018 until we decided to go to the World Cup, nor this year until the final two weeks before the JMCWC. I also like to do some Flash Anzan which helps a lot in training. Sometimes I prefer to work with the same format of the competition to get my mind be ready for the event.

Which category of Mental Math do you find most difficult – and why?

The most difficult things are the things I don’t like, and in this case it’s the inexact deep roots. The calculus method is too hard, and the logarithm method would need some memorization. They’ve been a sticking point for a few years, but still if I find a proper method I’d probably be good at them!

What else do you do outside of mental calculation?

I have quite a few hobbies. My latest one was playing chess, which I learned at the beginning of this year and made some quite good progress with that. I also like traveling. I travel a lot for mental calculations and so I sometimes take the opportunity to do some tourism. It’s also a great pleasure for me to read a lot on the Internet, also about tourism, a little bit of politics, some history and religion. I also love cats a lot. We have two at home, and one of them giving birth to new children just a few days ago!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on your adventures in Mental Calculation! We are looking forward to seeing you in action again during the 2020 competitions. If you would like to contact Mo directly, he receives email at mohammadelmir362@gmail.com