Undergraduate /
The Function Defined as P = Math - College Essay [10]
Oh boy! I've looked the essay over many times and done what I can to make it clear. I hope that'll lighten the work load for flow and grammar.
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Scrutinizing eyes wash over me. I feel the intensity of her gaze even as my own eyes focus on the blank backs of calendar pages, scrap paper.
"What are you waiting for? Go on", she firmly presses. Pencil in hand, I oblige her as I so often do. 1010, 1015, 1020. Strokes carefully form the next number: 1, 0, 2, and 5. Minutes become hours; numbers blend with one another as they swim in and out of my vision. I finish at 20,000 and present the finished product to the person beside me, my life's arbiter. Today, she smells of shampoo and ginger. I await judgment with a mixture of pride and apprehension. Calm and collected, she scours the papers for mistakes, poised to pounce on anything out of place. If she is pleased, I can't tell. Like always, her face remains an impassive mask as she eventually dismisses me.
Left without a hint of approval or disapproval, I was five at the time.
Every day, 365.25 days a year, we sat hunched over the kitchen table to observe this long-standing tradition. After the foundation of numbers set, the two of us branched into addition, multiplication, fractions, decimals, and the notorious algebra. The magical rules of adding fractions had me inevitably spellbound. The mysterious conventions orchestrating decimal point movement awed me. The introduction of variables left me helplessly mystified - "Mommy, are you sure? Why is the alphabet in my Math?" With each operation I performed, each number I manipulated, math was etched deeper and deeper into me. Every daily seating entwined mathematics a little more around the fiber of my being.
My mother stopped supervising my mathematics after fifth grade. I am now in twelfth grade, an AP Calculus student. If I even mention derivatives, she would play the memory card: "Oh, Peter, it has been too long!" But she and I both know about the change of roles. Once holding them with an iron grip, she has passed the reins over to me. You'd think that given this chance at freedom, I'd abandon my teachings. Instead, let this speak for my character. Over the years I've acquired a reverence for the discipline of mathematics. I would've never imagined that it contained such majestic puzzles, the methods arriving at their solutions both elegant and enlightening. Maneuvering about mathematical pitfalls, engaged in a battle of wits, I feel like I truly belong.
Creating order from disorder, math is my crutch in a life full of ambiguity and chaos. Its concreteness and rigour, where expressions like 1+1=2 always hold true, is a reassurance and one of life's few comforting consistencies. Absolute yet bound by its own laws, this subject possesses an unparalleled beauty. Bertrand Russell captures it in this quote: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere... sublimely pure".
Math frequently has me follow a systematic path to solve a given equation. Consequently, I learned to be logical, efficient, and meticulous in my analysis or response to problems. Take, for example, the predicament of how I am to enter my house after losing my keys (problem definition and identification). Before anything, I try to find the keys (preparatory analysis) by rechecking my pockets and retracing my steps. If I'm still empty-handed afterwards, I'll proceed to test my available options (computation) like climbing through an open window, forcing the back door open, waiting until my parents arrive with their keys, etc. The best course of action that emerges is the computational result. By applying these principles to everyday tasks, math becomes increasingly integral to my life.
So I thank the childhood ritual, one forged between mother and son, between unfeeling master and accommodating apprentice. It has shaped a central part of my identity and nurtured an unlikely passion. It brought me the objectivity and reason I admire so much.
