By Tim Chartier

Since 2020, high school students ages 15 to 18 submit compelling math communication projects to the National Museum of Mathematics, also known as MoMath, as part of the Steven H. Strogatz Prize for Math Communication. Cash prizes are awarded to the authors of the winning submissions who share a love of math with the world through social media, video, writing, song, poetry, dance, apps, art, or audio. Entries are judged based on content, creativity, and communication. Would you or someone you know want to participate? This year’s application deadline is April 27, 2022.

This past year, first prize in writing went to Julia Schanen, currently a senior at Montclair High School in Montclair, NJ. (She was a junior when she participated in the competition.) She fell in love with math in 9th grade and since then has been exploring it in her free time. Julia loves to tinker and explore various textbooks and take extra math classes outside of school. Julia has studied linear algebra on her own and has taken Art of Problem Solving classes. She has also worked as a teaching assistant for the NY Math Circle and is an active tutor. Besides math, Julia loves ballet and gymnastics, gardening, fashion, creative writing, and drawing. Julia also runs a side business online where she upcycles and designs clothes; she donates thirty percent of her proceeds to educational justice causes.

In the next Math Values post, we’ll share Julia’s moving poem on participating in the MAA’s American Mathematics Competitions (AMC). You may want a tissue handy as it’s left a number of people in tears. The poem is one among several Julia submitted based on her life as a teenage girl who loves math. Julia notes that she shares her thoughts about math in poetry for a few reasons. First, she noticed that people feel free to say “I’m not a math person!” but no one would dare say “I’m not a words person!” or joke about being illiterate. She found it interesting to show how a math person is also a words person, just as a words person is a math person. Because, as she noted, “...in the end, we’re all just people.”

Now, let’s meet Julia through her own words.

Chartier: How did you learn about the Strogatz Prize? Was the work, or some portion of it, already written? What prompted you to submit?

Schanen: I’ve really enjoyed some of MoMath’s panels (especially The Limit Does Not Exist series last summer), and I was just poking around the website when I randomly found the contest page. It seemed like a really cool idea, and last year’s winning entries were amazing. I thought about Ben Orlin’s doodles and maybe making some kind of a math comic myself. I thought about Amanda Gorman at the Inaugural, and how she made words seem like pieces of art. I thought back to a conversation with my mom in the car after I took the AMC 10 in 2020, right before Covid happened. My school doesn’t have the AMC, but I discovered that it was being offered at Kean University nearby and decided to give it a try at the last minute, just to have a little adventure. From the moment I picked up my pencil, I loved the creativity, novelty, and intensity of the problems. I felt like an outsider, but also that I was in the right place. It’s hard to explain, but that experience was a big moment for me. It felt like math was actually a part of my personality, and not just something that would get me closer to becoming an engineer or coder.

While I think I prefer “collaborative” math over competition math, my experience with AMC got me thinking. I learned that many students study year-round for these exams, starting at much younger ages. It seems rare to succeed in competition math without an early start and family support, and that’s probably true of math overall. I wonder about all the kids out there with mathematical promise who get no support. How do things like community environment, peer pressure, socio-economics and gender roles play into who is “good” at math and who just gives up and decides it’s scary or boring? I’m trying my best to put things like AMC and Math League on the radar for more kids in my town, starting with middle schoolers. I’ve been reaching out to a lot to younger students, especially girls. It’s easy to feel like you’re the only one who loves math when that’s just not true.

So all this was in my head when I learned about the Strogatz Prize. And also I was really into Amanda Gorman at the time because of her incredible performance at the Inaugural. I have never thought of myself as a writer, but I took a journaling class in 8th grade and have been free writing random thoughts and ideas and doodles in my notebooks ever since. I love to draw, and I like writing and sketching together, but it’s all pretty rough. But when I saw the contest info, something just hit me. I started putting all these bits and pieces together. Once I started it kind of took on a life of its own. I would be doing homework and suddenly get an idea and scribble it on the back of an assignment or type in the notes section of my phone. I ended up with this giant blob of writing that was way too long and all over the place. But I broke it up into pieces again, and chipped away at it and moved things around. And it was just a really fun and messy process. I have to say that calling it free verse kind of gave me a free pass to do whatever I wanted and disregard rules. If someone had given me a grading rubric or required it to fit into a certain structure, like we have to do in school, I probably would have lost interest. The great thing about it was that I knew nobody was going to grade this, or even see it if I didn't want them to. I used rhyme just where it kind of happened naturally and because I wasn’t following any rules I didn’t worry about whether I was doing it wrong. Wordplay kind of feels like a puzzle, not unlike some kinds of math problems, and it’s fun to experiment.

But it’s pretty wild to think that if it weren’t for Amanda Gorman, I might not have even tried to put my rambling, incoherent thoughts about math and joy and loneliness and connection into free verse.

I also want to say that before I submitted my entry I kind of froze, because some of the stuff in there was really personal and awkward. It felt good to get it down on paper just for myself, and it was an interesting and difficult process to shape it into something readable that had a narrative and wasn’t just a sloppy overwritten mess, but then it felt kind of terrifying to send it in because I wasn’t actually sure I wanted to let people inside my brain that much. But in the end, I guess that’s why people can relate to it.

Chartier: For a high schooler who hasn’t tried something like this, what advice would you give?

Schanen: I would say, give it a try, you have nothing to lose. Take what’s most unusual, interesting, or weird about you and see how that might overlap with what you love about math. You can make your own rules with this, and if what you create is terrible, no one will ever need to see it. But you never know, you might make something really cool, and then Professor Strogatz might tweet about it and you might get people all around the world commenting on how they can relate to what you created. That was really unbelievable.

So I would say take a risk and find the guts to create something really personal, whether it’s funny or dark or thought-provoking or just mathematically beautiful. Just push yourself a bit out of your comfort zone and take a chance and have fun with it! We’re all nerds, and it’s all good.

Tim Chartier is the Joseph R. Morton Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. He was the first Chair of the Advisory Council at the National Museum of Mathematics, continued as a member of the council, and is an active collaborator with the museum.