Simon Says: An Interview with a Fourth Year CCS Math Student

To contact a fellow undergraduate, I did what any other college student would do: I searched for him on Facebook. Immediately, I noticed a peculiarity to his profile. Unlike most students who have a main photo of them laughing under the influence of one or another or many other illegal substances, his profile picture featured math formulas. His web page further confirmed my speculation: he loved math. A majority of students have quotes from Anchorman, Napolean Dynamite, or Old School under their “favorite quotes” section, but he had one from, gasp, not a teen comedy. The quote by Robert Heinlein reads, "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." His personal philosophy reveals that “I don’t necessarily consider myself an optimist, but I always do math (and everything else, for that matter) in (fountain) pen. I can't bear to admit that mistakes are inevitable, so I strive for nothing short of perfection.” I thought, “Anyone who does their math homework in pen, I must meet.”

We planned to meet on the CCS lawn and, shortly before the interview, I momentarily feared we would miss each other’s tracks because, according to Simon, he does not use phones. Questions like “what if I got the time wrong,” or “what if my class gets out late and he thinks I ditched him” and “I hope I recognize who he is” flew in and out of my brain. Later, it occurred to me that if he doesn’t use phones, my thousand worries about missing an appointment probably never even occurred to him or at least, never bothered him. I spotted him sitting under the shade of a tree reading a book. Brown shaggy hair, blue eyes, Landsend sweater and jeans: this didn’t seem like a guy who, I would later found out, seriously considered dropping out of high school.

We relocated to a room inside a CCS Math class, one I didn’t know existed. I asked him the question I knew he, as well as many other CCS students had heard a million times before, “Why CCS?” He told me that Charles Ryavic used to hold a competition for high school students as a recruitment tool. “My sophomore year of high school, Charles Ryavic invited all the people that qualified. I met him and he started showing me problems and said all the problems were easy and I should be able to do them, but they were really hard and I didn’t know how do any of them. He had super geniuses [do the problems] and managed to think I was one of them.” Charles Ryavic became his mentor and eventually led him to choose CCS. During his orientation, Mr. Ryavic told him that “All of the undergraduate classes were useless. I figured he was probably crazy, but I followed his advice.” For Simon, choosing CCS turned out to be one of the best choices in his college life. “Honestly, it was one of exactly three good decisions I had in college.” He pauses for a moment, “I can’t remember any time after that I took anyone’s advice on anything.”

Next, I asked him about his high school experience and how it compared to college and he said that he came from a public high school that he didn’t, to say the least, particularly enjoy. Senior year, he came very close to dropping out at the advice of Mr. Ryavic. “When I was a junior, I won the advanced competition and he told me to not bother with my senior year of high school. I hated my high school and I seriously considered dropping out, but I decided I could probably tolerate it without any more degeneration.” When it finally came time to decide where to attend college, Simon faced two choices: CCS or Berkeley. “I had a choice between CCS and Berkeley. I wasn’t really looking forward to going to Berkeley and sitting through boring math classes. I thought I might be able to get around that by coming here.” I inquired, “Why not L and S then?” He said, “They don’t expect L and S students to take advanced classes; it’s not encouraged. I looked at the prerequisites and it was horrifying.”

Earning straight A’s freshman year wasn’t Simon’s primary concern. He started taking graduate level classes immediately upon his entrance to college. “I did horribly in the graduate classes, but I learned so much. I didn’t do a lot but study freshman year.” He then adds that you could argue that all four years he hasn’t done a lot but study. However, outside of classes, he is a member of the math and chess club and plays the piano and cello. In the future, he plans to attend Stanford Graduate school and become a mathematician possibly working on algebraic number theory, which he says, particularly interests him. Before the interview ended, I needed to ask one final question: does he really do his math homework in pen? He laughed and said, “I write everything in fountain pen or dip pen if I want to write something that looks nice.” But for math homework he uses TeX. “It’s a typesetting program that’s clearly text based [to make] things look professional.”