essaywriter230
Sep 25, 2017
Scholarship / QuestBridge Essay - An Intriguing Topic, Theory, or Concept That You Find Intriguing (500 words) [3]
Hello! This is my first post on EssayForum. I have answered the following prompt for the 500 Word essay for QuestBridge College Match:
Tell us about a concept, theory, or topic you have explored simply because it sparked your intellectual curiosity. Why do you find it intriguing? How do you want to further explore it?
My essay is below. Please leave any feedback you may have. Fellow applicants, please don't plagiarize! I really have put a lot of effort into my application, and am just looking for more opinions. Thanks!
It was already half past midnight. I had just wrapped up my homework, and all my body wanted to do now was tumble into bed and sleep. But my mind, as it so often is, was in rebellion, and simply wasn't up to it. After many, many hours browsing the Mathematics StackExchange website, I decided to delve into something that, at the time, I could not even begin to describe - Number Theory. Now, on a shelf a couple of feet away, lay Hardy and Wright's An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, which I had discovered completely untouched in an obscure corner of my local library. While I knew about as much about the subject as Columbus did about the Americas when he set sail in 1492, I was eager to explore the 656 pages that lay within those covers, those two pieces of cardboard as blue as the sea.
Indeed, in my head, I did feel like an explorer of sorts, and I still think that wasn't all just imagination. I may not have been looking for glory and land to claim for a king, but to take a step into this vast unknown seemed just as great. And so I did. Soon enough, I had become absorbed into the text, although many of the concepts detailed in each chapter still felt quite foreign. It was now 2 AM, and I had come across a page describing one of the most notable problems in Number Theory - Fermat's Last Theorem. I read the page multiple times, and the underlying concept seemed so tantalizingly simple. Yet mathematicians had found that proving it had been tremendously difficult, and involves mathematical spaces of which I have yet to comprehend the basics. And this is what I have found so intriguing, so captivating about Number Theory. The sheer amount of solutions left to be found has provided the freedom for mathematicians to entertain even the most far-fetched of conjectures, and where such ideas may end up is incredible to think about.
But I have only skimmed the surface so far, and an infinitesimal portion of the surface at that. After my first introduction to the topic, I completed a course from Stanford University on Elementary Number Theory, and want to continue this voyage in the years to come through attending seminars, taking classes, and, of course, reading books. I want to explore the applications of this form of mathematics, such as modern cryptography and the secure transmission of data, which resonates with my love for computer science. There is so much left to learn, and even more left to discover.
And to think it all started because I didn't want to go to sleep.
Hello! This is my first post on EssayForum. I have answered the following prompt for the 500 Word essay for QuestBridge College Match:
Tell us about a concept, theory, or topic you have explored simply because it sparked your intellectual curiosity. Why do you find it intriguing? How do you want to further explore it?
My essay is below. Please leave any feedback you may have. Fellow applicants, please don't plagiarize! I really have put a lot of effort into my application, and am just looking for more opinions. Thanks!
I didn't want to go to sleep
It was already half past midnight. I had just wrapped up my homework, and all my body wanted to do now was tumble into bed and sleep. But my mind, as it so often is, was in rebellion, and simply wasn't up to it. After many, many hours browsing the Mathematics StackExchange website, I decided to delve into something that, at the time, I could not even begin to describe - Number Theory. Now, on a shelf a couple of feet away, lay Hardy and Wright's An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, which I had discovered completely untouched in an obscure corner of my local library. While I knew about as much about the subject as Columbus did about the Americas when he set sail in 1492, I was eager to explore the 656 pages that lay within those covers, those two pieces of cardboard as blue as the sea.
Indeed, in my head, I did feel like an explorer of sorts, and I still think that wasn't all just imagination. I may not have been looking for glory and land to claim for a king, but to take a step into this vast unknown seemed just as great. And so I did. Soon enough, I had become absorbed into the text, although many of the concepts detailed in each chapter still felt quite foreign. It was now 2 AM, and I had come across a page describing one of the most notable problems in Number Theory - Fermat's Last Theorem. I read the page multiple times, and the underlying concept seemed so tantalizingly simple. Yet mathematicians had found that proving it had been tremendously difficult, and involves mathematical spaces of which I have yet to comprehend the basics. And this is what I have found so intriguing, so captivating about Number Theory. The sheer amount of solutions left to be found has provided the freedom for mathematicians to entertain even the most far-fetched of conjectures, and where such ideas may end up is incredible to think about.
But I have only skimmed the surface so far, and an infinitesimal portion of the surface at that. After my first introduction to the topic, I completed a course from Stanford University on Elementary Number Theory, and want to continue this voyage in the years to come through attending seminars, taking classes, and, of course, reading books. I want to explore the applications of this form of mathematics, such as modern cryptography and the secure transmission of data, which resonates with my love for computer science. There is so much left to learn, and even more left to discover.
And to think it all started because I didn't want to go to sleep.