Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
I stomped, she slid, he hopped, and above us, the stars were shining vividly, like you could trace an Eulerian path going across them. Having completed the last exam and satisfied our hunger, we were ready to stay up all night. But when we reached the front of our room, the other girl and I turned our eyes upon each other, waiting for the other to open, so we redirected our hopes to our guy friend.
"Don't look at me. This isn't my room. This is the girl's room."
He was fooling with us. He had in his possession a set of keys to enter to our room whenever he felt like it, but on other occasions that we had forgotten ours (yeah, it happened more than once) he didn't want to have anything to do with us. Entering through the window wasn't an issue for us -we were experienced-, but this time, though, we noticed that the other girl was inside, having what sounded like an important chat with her friend, so we decided not to bother them (we may have knocked and they didn't open, I honestly don't remember).
We sat on the floor, backs against walls, with nowhere else to go. In front of us were the walls that served as base for our hide and seek games and the benches where we crowded together and watch the world go by.
"Hey," I said. "How did you solve the problem one of the exam today?"
Faster than you can say "infinite descent" our backpacks were zipped open, paper sheets were spread in the floor, and with compass, pen and ruler on our hands, we began sketching.
"For homothety here, the orthocenter..."
"Considering the perpendicular bisectors..."
"Using the lemma, this is the incenter and..."
It was an easy problem, certainly not the most controversial of the exam, and everyone had solved it.
We caught the attention of the passers-by, who approached us when they recognized the drawing: "What are you doing?"
"We are trying to decide which solution is the prettiest," we replied. And so, they became judges too.
You may be wondering where this place filled with mathematical youth came from. You see, after the 2012 Mexican Mathematical Olympiad, the set of all x, such that x is a Gold medalist or belongs to the intersection of Silver medalists and Contestants that can still participate next year, are invited to four, ten-day long math sessions on different parts of the country. We call them the National Trainings. I used a scholarship to pay for them because my state has lost its funding, a decision that was criticized by my community. They think I only did exams and learnt "math stuff" but they don't know about the rest. That I was famous for solving a combinatory problem using a polygon (I even won a nickname). Or that I once stole the football from a guy than runs like a gazelle (he stole it back, but it's still the biggest achievement of my brief soccer career). Or that I stopped being the same after my friend moved a rare Magic card closer to the window so I could see it, and moonlight fell on it and surrounded it and brought it alive (the lights were off because my roomies were sleeping).
Math Olympians are the Monster group of sporadic groups: we have an order fifty-four digits long and there are no subgroups. We are meant to visit the math world together; that's something I discovered that night.
I stomped, she slid, he hopped, and above us, the stars were shining vividly, like you could trace an Eulerian path going across them. Having completed the last exam and satisfied our hunger, we were ready to stay up all night. But when we reached the front of our room, the other girl and I turned our eyes upon each other, waiting for the other to open, so we redirected our hopes to our guy friend.
"Don't look at me. This isn't my room. This is the girl's room."
He was fooling with us. He had in his possession a set of keys to enter to our room whenever he felt like it, but on other occasions that we had forgotten ours (yeah, it happened more than once) he didn't want to have anything to do with us. Entering through the window wasn't an issue for us -we were experienced-, but this time, though, we noticed that the other girl was inside, having what sounded like an important chat with her friend, so we decided not to bother them (we may have knocked and they didn't open, I honestly don't remember).
We sat on the floor, backs against walls, with nowhere else to go. In front of us were the walls that served as base for our hide and seek games and the benches where we crowded together and watch the world go by.
"Hey," I said. "How did you solve the problem one of the exam today?"
Faster than you can say "infinite descent" our backpacks were zipped open, paper sheets were spread in the floor, and with compass, pen and ruler on our hands, we began sketching.
"For homothety here, the orthocenter..."
"Considering the perpendicular bisectors..."
"Using the lemma, this is the incenter and..."
It was an easy problem, certainly not the most controversial of the exam, and everyone had solved it.
We caught the attention of the passers-by, who approached us when they recognized the drawing: "What are you doing?"
"We are trying to decide which solution is the prettiest," we replied. And so, they became judges too.
You may be wondering where this place filled with mathematical youth came from. You see, after the 2012 Mexican Mathematical Olympiad, the set of all x, such that x is a Gold medalist or belongs to the intersection of Silver medalists and Contestants that can still participate next year, are invited to four, ten-day long math sessions on different parts of the country. We call them the National Trainings. I used a scholarship to pay for them because my state has lost its funding, a decision that was criticized by my community. They think I only did exams and learnt "math stuff" but they don't know about the rest. That I was famous for solving a combinatory problem using a polygon (I even won a nickname). Or that I once stole the football from a guy than runs like a gazelle (he stole it back, but it's still the biggest achievement of my brief soccer career). Or that I stopped being the same after my friend moved a rare Magic card closer to the window so I could see it, and moonlight fell on it and surrounded it and brought it alive (the lights were off because my roomies were sleeping).
Math Olympians are the Monster group of sporadic groups: we have an order fifty-four digits long and there are no subgroups. We are meant to visit the math world together; that's something I discovered that night.
