Wenfei Xu

I don’t know what mathematics really is. I have gotten glimpses into some parts of mathematics, but the more classes I take, the more foreign it has become to me. It feels very intangible; math has become much more abstract that it ever was. This might be oversimplifying it a little bit, but I think the reason why I feel this way is because math has stopped revolving around numbers. All throughout elementary school and high school the goal of the solving most mathematics problems was to find a result, a numerical answer that, if you checked it with one of your friends, you could instantly tell whether or not you were correct. In college, especially in honors calculus, everything has become much more conceptual. Mathematics has moved from the physical world that I once thought it inhabited to this strange new idealized world where we are supposed to imagine epsilon balls in some imaginary space. In this idealized world, when you manipulate the pieces correctly (using your vast brain skills) they just fall together very nicely.

The more I find out about different types of mathematics, like topology or set theory, the more I’m determined that the field of mathematics is this imaginary playground with equipment you can play around on and discover cool tricks. I don’t really know what is contained in the field, nothing will surprise me too much at this point, but what I do think I know is that mathematics is really just about learning how to use your brain correctly, which permeates into other aspects of life.