By Duxy Toinury

To me, math is a good friend and rival who pushes me to do better, whom I am simply unable to match. Despite our gap, never for a second does it demotivate me. I am motivated by the insurmountable gap, the ever-shifting goalpost. Math is the friend I joke with while getting lost in their words as they talk of their work, just far beyond me. It is that getting lost I love; getting a glimpse into their world is a beautiful piece of the puzzle. To me, math is everything.

In my senior year of high school, I was driving to my differential equations class. At this time, I was already studying proof techniques, graph theory, and real analysis, but I struggled with anything outside of math. On this drive, the car in front of me stopped quickly, and I did the same in turn. The semi-truck behind me rear-ended me because of this, spinning me out to get T-boned by a second semi. Before the second truck hit me, my only thought was that I was about to die. I was conscious the entire time after this, but I was pretty badly concussed. When I finally fully understood where I was again, I was in an ambulance with 2 EMTs. I asked all the natural questions in my state of panic, asking if I’d be okay, whether my mother knew, what happened, and so on, and the same person proceeded to answer all my questions. But as soon as the panic subsided, I asked the only thing I could think to ask. I asked for pencil and paper. When asked what I needed it for, I just said I wanted to do math. The man asked one more question, why do you want to do math. There was only one possible answer to this question: “I love math”. That’s when I heard the other EMT’s voice for the first time, where he said, “I know you’ve told us 5 times already.” Looking back, this is a clear representation of what math is to me. Math is everything, my comfort, my competition, my friend.

“Every being cries out silently to be read differently” (Simone Weil, page 188 of Gravity and Grace)

When I read this, I see the desire to be understood without being asked. This task does not occur too often. It is to be seen in the thoughts we have without saying what we need. To be read properly is to be read differently. All people are different in their experiences and needs. The idea of announcing your desire from the rooftops, as suggested by Aji, is to admit that no one knows you well enough to assist without being asked. It is the difference between a mother making her child’s favorite meal when she notices they have less energy than normal, and making the meal upon request. While both of these actions mean a lot, there is a beautiful recognition in the mother being able to see her child’s silent cries. It is that beauty that we long for, for someone to understand us so well that we need not tell what we need, but for our needs to be recognized anyway. Of course, this desire is not always achievable, nor does it promote the most healthy communication when taken to extremes, but it is an understandable idealization of our relationships.

I like that the first thought of Aji is empathy. There are certainly readings of this quote that do not require the calling of empathy. Aji writes, "I believe that the changes that accompany empathy are more worthwhile than changes that accompany many other efforts, and that empathy is connected with finding meaning in my life path." Giving a sort of retort to that point, I personally don’t share this same viewpoint. I find Weil’s idea to be of a more genuine understanding of a person than I believe empathy entails. I believe that understanding emotions is not enough; instead, every person’s desire to be understood differently goes as deep as their beliefs and desires. This goes far beyond what empathy can give you; besides, perhaps, understanding that you should understand these things.

The goal to understand how math influences us is an admirable one that I share. Who math is, is certainly a much harder question to answer than can be understood in a lifetime. To understand as much as possible is a respectable goal, though.

Tell me about one time math made you laugh.

When doing math, I will often describe a proof as cute. To me, cute is one of the highest compliments a proof can receive. I find the strive for elegance of proofs often leads people to proofs that are shorter than they deserve to be, to not include details that would make the proof clearer, simply because the proof would be longer and in turn, less 'elegant'. To me, that is often a representation of a failure of the author to properly express their ideas. I will still use elegant to refer to such proofs, but to me, it is a loaded term. I find a cute proof to be a short and sweet proof that uses a clever idea to prove a statement that would often take a lot of work.

I will, on occasion, run into a cute proof in my attempts to understand a problem. After hours of struggling through a problem, I can never help but laugh if the proof turns into a 2-line cute argument. It feels so silly that so much effort turned into so few actual words.

Tell me about a time in your life when being denied a math opportunity was a blessing in disguise. Or, tell me about a time when a math opportunity changed your mind in some way.

I was accepted to attend the Budapest Semester of Mathematics (BSM). After my acceptance, but before leaving, I experienced a traumatic event. The details of said event don't matter, besides the fact that I was diagnosed with PTSD after the fact.

I still attended BSM and tried taking 6 classes at the same time while sitting in on 3 other classes. I would sit in on study sessions, do all the homework, and all of that fun stuff. With this approach, I never gave myself the chance to heal, and I kept getting worse. To me, math was everything, and it still is, but I needed to prioritize myself in a way I wasn't doing. I wanted to get every opportunity to push forward in my mathematical abilities but completely ignored myself in the process. I couldn't possibly maintain the amount of growth I had dreamed of. It just felt as if every moment in my head was revolving around that moment, while math just let me momentarily escape.

I went home. I saw a series of doctors who were helping me work through the events. I kept working on math, but slowly. I realized my use of mathematics as a way to take me away from my problems was the very crux I needed to overcome. So, I gave myself time to feel, bringing me through some of the most painfully fruitful moments of my life.

Duxy is a grad student focusing in extremal combinatorics, they are an aspiring writer and mathematician.