Mathematics

Math is certainly one of my passions, and while being a participant of the Mexican Mathematics Olympiad, I certainly learned to see Mathematics as something MUCH deeper than what we learn in our schools. We were constantly writing essays for the English Class, and once I made a short essay about my experience. I find it a condensate of what I have learned from it, and I want to share it.

This is the logo of Nuevo Leon's Organizing Committee: OMMNL

To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it.

Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician’s lament

My perception of math is completely different from that of many people I have met. When I hear my classmates say something like, “I hate math!” or “I hate science!” or “I hate everything related with numbers!” I just can’t figure out how such wonders could split us so sharply into “lovers”, “haters”, and “those who simply don’t care.” Is it just a matter of taste or are we prejudging that which we barely understand? Perhaps we keep looking for a sense that should not be found, but fashioned by our own imagination. It is hard to say when I became a “lover” of math, but the OMM (Mexican Mathematics Olympiad) definitely had something to do with it. My impression of the OMM as merely another math contest was drastically transformed when I was given four hours to solve an exam consisting of only three questions! Even my notion of “a problem” was reformulated when I discovered that there are no answers, only solutions that arise from single, brand-new ideas generated by ourselves. Math, then, is the process of using your imagination to unearth those wonderful ideas. The OMM taught me that knowledge is far more complex and nuanced than we could ever imagine, and that math is “the art and craft of problem solving”.