Up to this time my father used to play his old 78RPM classical records for me without much effect. It was about at this age that I developed some appreciation for good music. This liking later manifested itself in the fifth grade when, at the suggestion of school officials, I began to study the violin and to play in my school's orchestra. A few years later my father bought a hi-fi stero record player and, although I was still playing in the school orchestra, my musical knowledge now became really enriched. Soon I began to buy more records than did my father.

As the years went on I was musically satisfied playing the violin, going to concerts, writing music, and listening to recods. Of late, however, I have become interested in folk music. At the beginning of my junior year I bought a guitar and joined a school guitar club, about the same time that I joined the school chorus. At the suggestion of Mr. Rensin, the head of the Music Department, I began to tak piano lessons a few weeks ago. My efforts in composition have proven somewhat successful. A composition of mine for three violins was played by a few members of the school orchestra and myself and Mr. Rensin thought it was very interesting.

I cannot say, however, that my intellectual life has centered around music. My other love is mathematics. In the seventh grade I became enchanted with the beauty of math and got out numerous heavy volumes from the local library. As a result of this precocious development I became the most mathematically learned student in my junior high school, and got top prize at a competition held between 4 school districts. In my senior year I was awarded the junior high school's mathematics medal at graduation. Far from lessening, my mathematical exploits now could only incrase. At the Bronx High School of Science I met many students who were similarly inclined to mathematical research. In my sophomore year I was appointed to the staff of the Math Bulletin, the official mathematics magazine of the school. In my junior year I was selected to be on the Junior Math Team and to take two special math courses, one an accelerated eleventh year math course with supplementary topics, and a course in numerical analysis in which, during the second half of the course next year, I will get a chance to use the school's 1620 IBM computer. Very recently the Math Teams as well as all the brightest math students in the school entered the annual contest given by the Mathematical Association of America. My individual score was found to be the twenty-third highest in the school, including the seniors.

A third interest of mine is creative writing. In the eighth and ninth grades I began writing literally scores of very short stories. I had at this time a passion for musty old used books and my father used to take us down to the Greewich Village bookshops nearly every Sunday. My book collection has since grown considerably and is now somewhere in the five-hundreds. In my sophomore year at high school my English teacher decided that I had creative ability and this year appointed me to the staff of the literary magazine of the school, Dynamo.

Although my intellectual life has tended to concentrate on music and math, I have also been exposed to a great many other facets of life. Since I was about five years old my family used to vacation at a dairy farm upstate where I had the opportunity of gaining an appeciation of the out of doors. For years my father and I have been going on weekend fishing trips. Sometimes my mother and my thirteen year old sister Gail accompany us. For many years one of our weekend haunts was the American Museum of Natural History (as well as various art museums) where I spent many a Sunday roaming the dinosaur halls and the Book Shop. Only a few years ago, the the ninth grade, I had the opportunity of travelling down to Miami Beach for a week with my grandfather.

At present I plan to further my education at college, specializing in either math or music. After college I hope to become a teacher in one of these fields.