bruce nonfic blog

Prompt: What’s your role in your family? Much can happen within the span of two and a half years. From seventh to ninth grade, a global pandemic and a personal deep dive into the world of Brawl Stars. From ninth to eleventh grade, a shift in focus from math competitions to pure mathematics.  But the most important two and a half years in my life aren’t related to any specific time period. These two and a half years remain constant no matter how much time has passed–the age difference between myself and my older brother, Andy. In my early childhood, this two-and-a-half year gap translated into an unquenched competitive drive, as my brother had a head start of both wisdom and experience. I was far behind in science, reading, and math, but I discovered other metrics that were more favorable to me. I wanted to establish myself beyond the title of Andy’s younger brother, so I took on chess, soccer, and swimming. My skills improved rapidly with these competitive goals in mind. However, i...

Prompt: Do you wish you could return to a moment from your past? In my first semester of junior year, I wanted to go back–to the six weeks of summer I spent at a math camp in Columbus, Ohio. And yet, when I first arrived, I was convinced that the experience would be six mundane weeks of staring at symbols and numbers for hours on end.  Although the daily problem sets did take up most of my time, I gradually improved as the weeks passed. From a handful of assumptions, I learned to make conjectures, test their validity, and discover lines of reasoning to establish them as proof. Numbers and their properties, primality, modular exponentiation, quadratic reciprocity: the sheets of scratch paper became grounds for discovering how beautiful theorems emerged from the mundane.  Equally as engaging as the mathematical content were the people I met at that math camp. It didn’t matter if a fellow camper was from Texas, California, Virginia, Illinois–we were there to explore together, six...