Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Kendall Clark, Katherina Socha, Dean Cureton, and Ken Ono for the “Stories of Impact” series.

Watch the video version of the interview.
 
RS =  Richard Sergay (interviewer)
KC =  Kendall Clark (interviewee)
KS =  Katherina Socha, PhD (interviewee)
DC =  Dean Cureton (interviewee)
KO =  Ken Ono, PhD (interviewee)

KC: I'm Kendall Clark, and I'm an eleventh grader at the Park School of Baltimore. 

RS: When love of math began?

KC: Well, it actually started in high school, which I think is later than it does for most other students who are really into mathematics.yeah, I mean I was good at math all along, but you know, in middle school I considered myself to be more of a humanities person, and in the 9th grade when I had my first class with Kathrina Socha, it was really interesting and the types of math that we were doing, were also very interesting, it wasn't just your common core algebra, geometry. We had applications and we looked at different fields that were at maybe a higher level, but they were edited to-- so they could be introduced to a high school classroom. And I really enjoyed doing combinatorics with her. That was definitely my favorite unit.

RS: Combinatorics?

KC: Combinatorics is basically a sort of permutation, the study of permutations in mathematics. And you're looking at different ways you can organize different things, organize, for example, one of the problems we had to do was how many ways can you arrange five different books on a shelf, and fact-- different factors come into play, like can you have the same book, all five times, just have five copies of the same book, or do you have to use each of the five books for example. So it's, it's sort of like that, and it's little puzzles and just playing around with different arrangements of things and I thought that was really fun.

RS: Not your first love?

KC: No. I mean, like I was always a studious kid, I liked school. And math-- I didn't feel one way or another about it.

RS: It became interesting?

KC: Yeah, I don't know, I think Katherina was a teacher who really reached out to me, and she-- she sort of saw that it was something that I was enjoying and she wanted to make me have even more of that experience, she wanted to really cultivate my love of mathematics, from that little bit I had experienced in the beginning of 9th grade.and no teacher had ever really reached out to me like that,I remember in middle school it was just you do the math from the book, you do a hundred problems and then you take a test, and that's the end of it. But here it was something a little bit more beautiful. It was-- you spent time on each problem, there were certain details and nuances that you could look at and I really enjoyed getting to understand some of the different concepts in my first class here. 

RS: A-ha moment?

KC: I don't know if it was really an a-ha, I feel like it was more of a gradual change, just as I kept coming to class, it was like ooh, this is fun, this is a class I'm looking forward to, and before it was just a class in the day. So, I wouldn't say it was an aha moment. 

RS: Surprise you?

KC: I-- again, because it was so gradual, it just became something that I liked to do, you know, when you're in high school and you apply for different programs and camps and things, they tend to ask the kids oh, what do you like to do, what kind of things do you like in school, and math just became one of the subjects that I added to that list. 

RS: Always good in math?

KC: Yeah. I was always good in school, I wanted good grades. So if I didn't understand something I would just work until I did.

RS: This class taught you what about math?

KC: I think when I began in Katherina's class, she sort of showed me that math was-- doing math was more of a personal journey. You get what you want out of the problems.and before, when I was in algebra, the class I was in was algebra, and you can do a whole bunch of algebra problems in a very short amount of time. And for that class, it seemed as if the point was to learn the concepts and then be able to do the problems as fast as possible, but in Katherina's class we really sort of looked at the multiple ways you could approach a single problem,and you know, for example somebody who was an algebraist might approach one problem one way and somebody who focuses more on geometry you know, might look at it a different way. and I think it just shows that math can be a field that's tailored to any individual depending on how they go about problem solving. 

RS: Girls don't do as well, proving that thought wrong?

KC: Yeah, I guess. I mean, girls are good at math, like-- girls are good at math, girls are bad at math, guys are good at math, guys are bad at math. It's just-- I don't know. I don't-- the fact that there's stigma around it is kind of pointless, because it's something that differs from person to person.however I do find that math anxiety is a very commonplace issue, especially in high schools and especially among women, simply because the field is so competitive.and I don't know, some people really thrive off of that competitive energy. Some people really need somebody else trying to beat them, as a motivation. I personally do not find that to be the case. When I do math, I'm doing it because I want to solve the problem. If it's a problem I'm not interested in solving, I mean, I'll do it if I have to, but I would rather focus on something I enjoy.-- and with the culture of standardized testing and AP's, I really think that people are just conditioned to try and be able to do as much as they possibly can, in as little time, or to be able to get a better score than someone else, and I don't think that's the point. When I was in Katherina's class, the point wasn't to learn math so that you could get an A on the test, the point was to understand a new concept, and see the world in a different way. So I guess going back to the issue of women and mathematics and women in STEM in general, I don't know, maybe it's the sort of idea that guys take over things, or that they want to beat people, and I mean, there are girls who do that too, but I think masculinity sort of comes with an idea of being better. And I don't know if that's necessary, I really don't think it is. 

RS: She helped open this vista you're now excelling in?

KC: Maybe-- I feel like part of the reason I came to enjoy math so much, may have just been because of the timing. Because maybe at this point I wasn't necessarily loving history or I really wasn't loving English at that point, so math was just an area where I could really hone in my skills and put a lot of time into that.now yet again, I said Katherina really reached out to me and invested in me as a student.

RS: Katherina invested in you?

KC: Well, I remember there was one day after classI don't remember exactly what we'd been doing but I was packing my things away and I was in there a little bit later than all the other students and Katherina said, you're really good at this. Like, I think you should do some more math. I was like really. Really, oh, I never, I really didn't ever think about that, I didn't really think I was you know, especially good. And I don't know, from that point on I just sort of thought oh, she thinks I'm good, and that made me feel really special and when you have a teacher who can make their students feel special in one way or another, and if that sort of honed to the student,for Katherina and I it was meeting outside of school and reading different books. And I remember she sent me home with all of these books to read. I would read them and we would talk about them, and we would do some problems. Katherina gave me these books or print outs from different books, and of course, they were math books but they weren't really text books, they were these sort of introductions to different fields of mathematics, so there was an intro to graph theory, there was James Tanton's Trigonometry book, there were all of these different books that I could read and sort of pick and choose and see what I liked to do. I would read different sections and different chapters and do-- I would just do the problems that interested me.and then Katherina and I would take some time out of class to talk about them, go over them, see where I made mistakes, see where I could be a little bit more efficient in my thinking, and just to streamline the problem overall. and I really don't know how she reached out to other students or how other teachers do that because that's not really any of my business, but when a teacher, as I said before, can make their students feel special and really encourage them to work harder, I think that's something really wonderful. Because something as simple as just giving me a set of books, and I even have one of those books to this day, that really made an impact on my interest in math.

RS: Importance that teachers inspire?

KC: I think it's pretty important, but it's really hard to find teachers that inspire every student. Certain people just click, and I was lucky enough to have that experience with Katherina. I think if I had that experience with say a science teacher or an English teacher, I wouldn't be sitting here having this interview right now, and a teacher that clicks with a student is a teacher that really makes them think in ways, sort of expand their own existence, and expand just how they perceive the world, and how they really feel about themselves, in line with of course the subject materials. so I-- and I think, I've had a lot of friends at Park who have found teachers who they really, really connect with. And I think that's a really great thing about going to a school like this, where the classes are small, and the courses are really, really specific. Where else would you go to find a high school that teaches no theory. Only the kids who are really, really interested in learning about that are going to sign up for the course, so, Park definitely helps with that.

RS: Other subjects?

KC: Currently I'm taking an English class that I really, really love. It's called Mass Incarceration. So the way the English system works at the school, is that once you've made it through the first semester of your sophomore year, you can choose any electives you want to take. And those electives ultimately amount to credits, because despite the fact that the course material is more specifically related to a different subject, you still get the grammar, you still get the reading and you still get the writing practice. So currently I'm taking a course called Mass Incarceration, as I said, and it's basically focusing on the penal system in the United States and how that pertains to race. We've had a lot of in-depth discussions and we've had to write a lot of different responses to prompts and questions and it's just-- it's a really thought-provoking class. And I've really been enjoying it. 

RS: Math at the moment?

KC: At the moment it's been a whole mixture of things. As I said, I signed up to take a class called Knot Theory,-- Knot theory, ok, you know you've got knots on your shoes, like you've tied a knot. Basically, you're looking at the formation of different loops and tangles in the three-dimensional space.so it's actually a section of typology, which is the study of figures and surfaces in three dimensions and we actually did a unit on just general typology, which is really interesting because it doesn't have anything to do with geometry, or algebra, in that shapes, they don't have to look the same to be identical or to have the same properties. It's not a field of mathematics that I really know a whole lot about, but this class has been sort of an intro to a lot of different subjects, and a lot of different disciplines. So we have the knot theory. And the whole point of knot theory is finding out an invariant that can distinguish different types of knots, and you know, there are different protocols for doing that, but it's actually still a field that professional mathematicians are researching today. So, obviously taking the class in high school isn't going to give me the full comprehensive understanding of the field, but just a little taste of what I could experience later on. Right now we're actually doing a little bit of calculus, sequences and series and understanding just the nature of functions. Just as a little bit of review because that was the class that Ben and I both took last year. 

RS: Beautiful?

KC: Sometimes. Sometimes you see these people, right, like the stereotypical nerd and they're just reading off digits of pi and multiplying polynomials and saying huge numbers that people don't understand, and I don't think that's beautiful because nobody understands it. Nobody really knows what's happening and nobody can apply it to anything. Sometimes math is a field where people get to show off, and I don't think that's beautiful. I think that's sort of an ugly part of human nature, trying to be better than someone else just for the sake of beating them, as I said before. But-- I think math is beautiful, not necessarily in terms of aesthetics, but just in the idea that you can use it as a means of exploration and discovery of the world around you, and in terms of understanding how you as a person solve problems, that it's-- it's even a method of self-discovery. And I would argue that that's really crucial to somebody's development. And I think it-- I was really lucky to have had this experience with math, in my high school career, and to be able to just approach it in a way that really made it enjoyable for me.

RS: Math-science. Math as an art?

Well, it's actually interesting, because I plan to do an independent study next year in mathematics, and I want to look at the overlap between the humanities and math. I want to see if there's a way that mathematical concepts can be explained and explored through literature, and literature of course, creative writing, that's an art form.so I think mathematics does have the possibility to be artistic. And to be you know, lyrical or pleasing and I think we just really need to have people who are interested in finding out when that happens. And if math is beautiful, math is commonly shown as being something that sounds nice or looks nice, I think more people would be interested in it. If more people knew that when they're looking at seashells on the beach, they're looking at spirals and fractals and even geometric figures, you know, maybe people would be more interested if it sort of gave off the visceral reaction that looking at an art piece or reading, reading a story that sort of same effect.

RS: Musical score?

KC: I don't know much about music, but yeah, I understand.

RS: Ramanujan?

KC: I watched the Man Who Knew Infinity, and I know that he kept very detailed notes, just about anything he observed, and from what I gathered from that film, ideas just kind of came to him, and I think that's really amazing, because that doesn't necessarily happen to me, you know, I find myself having to read different sources and have different people explain things to me and I have to write notes over and over before I understand something. And Raman-- it just seems to come to him. He would just write it down and it would be there. And maybe that just shows how we're different people. He and I. Like maybe some people it just sort of comes to them, it's in their nature to be a mathematician. To have a math mind as some people might say and he of course also had to work hard, because of course there's the amount of natural talent that one might have, but there's also like, how much dedication and time someone puts into crafting that. And I think going off to Oxford University and having to deal a lot with the prejudice-- prejudices he faced there, really made it clear that Ramanujan was passionate about his field, and understanding mathematics, particularly in terms of permutations and partitions to my understanding. As I said before I'm not really a competitive person. So, I don't really like to do math with a lot of people breathing down my neck, or in my ear, or just in my space in general. I like to be alone and to be able to really put all of my focus into the problem that I am addressing. When I have just any sort of math problem whether it be algebra, whether it be calculus, whether it be more of a visualization problem, I really like to write. I write out everything I do, I write you know, the operations, and of course why I've carried them out the way I have, and why it works that way, because I never want to forget, I don't want to go into my books, like after a whole year of school and after I've forgotten all of that stuff, and then not be able to understand my own writing. I think it's really important that I just preserve my state of mind and how I'm thinking, when I go to do a problem, because that will help me to become more efficient in the future, and to just edit my approach as time goes by.

RS: Math journal?

KC: It's usually just my school notebook. for a class, right, I took calculus last year, I had a notebook. I would take my notes from class in that book, and when I went to do my homework, I would just write out my problems really meticulously and focus on a lot of details, just so like, just so even when I went back to study for the test, it would be easier for me to understand. I would have to do less work in the future.

RS: Friends who ask for help?

KC: I mean, sometimes, sometimes people ask for help. I also don't think I'm the best at helping people, because once I understand something, it's a whole other story to explain it to someone else in a way that they understand. And I think that's how some people are just good teachers. Because they-- figure out a way to explain things in a way that's understandable, and a way to alter that explanation in case somebody finds themselves having trouble. Hopefully, when I move forward in my academic career, I'll be able to do that more, but if the problem is simple, totally. I'll help, I'll help out. 

RS: New respect for what teachers do?

KC: Yeah, because I used to go around, if a teacher-- if I found I wasn't understanding the class I would be like oh, the teacher is bad. Or oh, this teacher is doing a bad job. But, really, I don't know if I can actually determine that.

RS: College is approaching, focus on math?

KC: I really don't know. It's something I enjoy doing, of course I'd like to take more classes, more advanced classes, and classes where I look at the applications of mathematics. I'm really interested in physics, so I would like to look and understand the whole inner workings of the universe a little bit more. These are just things I really don't know anything about, and maybe in college I'll decide that that's my passion and that's what I want to do with my life, but right now, I am just playing it by ear.

RS: The award?

KC: Well, I applied really short notice, so I was actually just outside with my friends, hanging out, and Katherina found me and she was like, Kendall there's a thing and I think you should do it, and I was like ok, what is it, and she said well, if you present some of the work you've done in math, you can get a grant and you can use that money to sort of expand your studies, and to just add to that material. And I thought ok, I'll give it a shot, I'll see what happens. A few weeks later, I was invited to the White House and I was like oh, I-- I did not expect that to happen, we turned in the form, it was a day late, and it was kind of a mess, I liked doing math but I really hadn't heard of the Spirit of Ramanujan Award ever before, it was just something I tried and a lucky strike.

RS: What did you get?

KC: I got some grant money and I'm actually going to be putting that towards a summer research opportunity that I will be doing at St. Mary's College of Maryland this summer. I don't know exactly what I'll be doing for the type of mathematics that I will be studying as of right now, but I do know that it will be an opportunity to work with undergraduate students who are really interested in the field, and then also get to know some professors so I think that would be really helpful for me just as a junior in high school to understand you know, maybe a little bit of what college life is like. Or, a little bit of what my summers might look like in the future. And then of course just of course to play around with math and have some fun solving problems.

RS: White House?

KC: Oh, it was just a showing of the Man Who Knew Infinity. It was for people who had won the award, and that was how I found out I had won. I sent in the application, and a little while later I got an email, it was like you're invited to a screening of the Man Who Knew Infinity at the White House. I was-- I just thought to myself, oh, is this SPAM, it says it has the presidential seal, but anybody can copy and paste that onto an email. So at first I really did think it was SPAM and then I had my mom come into the room and she was like nope, you're going to the White House. So, it was just a pleasant surprise. Well, I think it could have been a little bit better because Obama wasn't there, but it was really a nice experience. I just went with my mom and Katherina and we walked in, there was a lot of security, and we sat down, listened to a panel discussion, and watched the movie. I met Jeremy Irons. That was cool.

RS: What to tell students-- inspire students to do math?

KC: That's a pretty big question. I would probably just say that it's really a good idea to try and find how math applies to something you find interesting. Or even if you're not necessarily studying the applications of math, or you don't really want to take time out of class to learn more, maybe you could find a way to make the class work for you, maybe you could reach out to the teacher and forge a relationship with them, and just sort of try and figure out your own learning style. Because if you don't know how you go about solving a problem, you obviously can't find the best way of doing it, you know. So what I would recommend is that everybody just give it a try and if it doesn't work the first time, do not hesitate to do it again. 

RS: How does it apply to your world?

KC: I would say I find that there's a question and there's an answer, or at least in elementary mathematics, there's a question and there's a finite specific solution that you have to find, and of course if you don't find it, you're wrong and you don't get the point on the test. But in terms of how you get from the question to the answer, that's where I think the gray area is. And I feel like that's something that can be sort of black and white and that there's a question and then there's a specific answer however the way you get to the--that answer varies from person-to-person. And that's what I think is actually the gray area in mathematics, and that's what I find so interesting, as I said before, topologists would go about solving a problem in a way that's completely different from an algebraist. I had a talk with Katherina about this, we talked about this in class many a time, and I just-- I don't know, the fact that knot theory is usually a higher-level course, made me sort of understand less about the actual quantitative answers to the problems, and more about the fact that people just get confused, and get lost. And they have to deal with it. And some people just cope with that in different ways. 

RS: Creativity in math?

KC: So as I said math was black and white because there's a question and then there's usually one answer but creativity comes in the method that you use to solve the problem, so as I said before, different types of mathematicians approach the same problem in different ways. Now, the creative development of mathematics comes when your way of solving the problem does not work, and when you have to think on the spot, and figure something else out.

---

KS: My name is Katherina Socha, I teach mathematics at the Park School in Baltimore. And I teach Kendall Clark. 

KC: I'm Kendall Clark and I am a junior at the Park School of Baltimore. 

RS: What you saw in Kendall?

KS: Sure. I first met Kendall when she signed up to take my 9th grade class. She was placed in our regular 9th grade class. We start with a subject called combinatorics, which is clever counting patterns, combinations, permutations, and usually in that class, we focus on problem-solving techniques. We open up the approaches to a solution, to all sorts of creative tactics, creative strategies to solving a problem. We can visualize, we can count, we can write algebra formulas and what I noticed is that Kendall was remarkably fast and she had a lot of passion for figuring out not just the answer but all sorts of different roads to the answer.

RS: You discovered something in Kendall?

KS: You can tell when somebody brings a kind of joy to their work. There's a-- there's a lightness, there's a willingness to do the gritty work. There's an enthusiasm for understanding every last detail. There is a willingness to fail, to be wrong, to try again, to persist. And she was bringing those as a ninth-grader to a class where I had very good students but rarely any major math lovers. And so I started giving her slightly harder problems. I suggested that she might think about the binomial coefficient problem, and one day in class she outlined a solution. And a proof and it was really beautiful. So I suggested she might like to learn a little more. And we started reading together outside of class.

RS: She likes puzzling out?

KS: Kendall really seems to have enjoyed puzzling things out for herself. She does not want to be told the answer. She doesn't want to be told a solution strategy or given lots of hints. In that first year when we were working together, I gave her some extra work on a subject called graph theory which is a way of analyzing networks and communication patterns and efficient shipping patterns. I had her work through a set of classical problems in graph theory and I'm sorry, I let her work for two months on an impossible problem and she did it. She worked every day on this problem for two months. And then finally with a few guiding questions from me and from some of my colleagues, she proved that it was actually impossible and that's delightful.

KC: Two months. It's a really long time. 

RS: What was that like?

KC: It wasn't bad at all. I just, since I was doing these other problems I would take some time in class and work on it by myself. I'd work a little bit at home. It was just like doing work for any other class except it was a little more relaxed. So no pressure, no stress, I just wanted to see what the answer was. 

RS: You found it was impossible?

KC: I mean, I was a little, I wasn't mad I was just a little peeved like I spent two months on us. I-- I could have been doing something else with my life. But you know it's ok. I think it's okay because it really I guess, did show how much endurance I had, and I didn't really think that I would have dedicated so much of my time to a problem if I hadn't known that there was no solution of course. And you know the fact that they put so much time into it, made me sort of think oh, yeah, this has to be something I'm interested in.

RS: The test, besides endurance?

KS: So I was looking for all the different problem strategies she might try. She might have tried visualization, she might have tried to change or simplify the problem, she might have tried to actually put in numbers and think about particular patterns. There are all sorts of different problem-solving strategies that I and my colleagues like to emphasize in our math classes. These are called Mathematical Habits of Mind and Kendall tried all of them and that's remarkable for a young student to persist so long on something that they don't know how to do. And to try different strategies rather than to spin their wheels over and over and over and the same strategy.

RS: A joy for math?

KS: A lot of people find satisfaction when they solve a problem. A lot of people enjoy wrestling with hard problems and finally succeeding or coming up with a solution. Those are great. Those are satisfying. But-- how do you describe seeing somebody who's joyous in their work. How do you describe watching Yo-Yo Ma play the cello? There's a kind of joyfulness that, I'm a mathematician, I didn't go to English school, I went to math school. So I recognize the-- the kind of delight in the pattern thinking and the problem-solving.

RS: Stigma associated with girls in math and STEM?

KS: I don't think there is a stigma. I think that some communities have traditionally been more welcoming to women in mathematics than others. They may vary according to culture, according to family. I'm not sure about those. I think mathematics is a really wide-open field. I think it has a place for everybody who enjoys thinking about problems, who enjoys investigating patterns. There are as many ways to be a mathematician as there are to be a writer. And I hope that by showing all those ways to students we can help them see themselves in mathematics, girls, and boys.

RS: You agree with that?

KC: I mean, I think, at least I personally encountered more girls who have sort of an anxiety toward math, and I don't know why that's the case. Maybe it has to do with the fact that some communities are more open to accepting everybody in the field of mathematics. But yeah, I do agree with the fact that it's really necessary for everybody to find their own way of problem-solving and since it's such a personal thing it really, gender doesn't matter.

RS: Spirit over genius?

KS: The word genius feels a little bit overused. To me, it feels unwelcoming. It feels as if you're setting up a standard that very few people can achieve. I much prefer the word spirit. I liked the Spirit of Ramanujan. Was the name of some of the things we looked at, I think that's right. Yes. I much prefer spirit because everybody can have spirit. Genius is a word that applies to some of the most famous people in our history. And I don't think you have to be the most famous person in history to embrace mathematics, to love it, to find creative ways to make it your own. Whether you like the kind of mathematics that's puzzle-y and figuring out combinations and patterns or whether you like the kind of mathematics that's more analytical, that is akin to diagramming a sentence and understanding how all the verbs and the nouns and all the moving pieces fit together. Spirit means you find yourself in that field, in that subject, and more than that, you take joy, you take delight in it.

RS: Inspiration teachers bring?

KS: I would say I don't instill, I open doors. I try to see the whole person who is in front of me and work with it. I like to find ways for you to be a mathematician. If your primary interest is biology what can you say about phyla taxes and the golden spiral. If your primary interest is chemistry. If your primary interest is chemistry, what can you say about crystallography and group structures that model symmetries in certain chemicals. If your primary interest is art history, how can mathematics help you validate the provenance of a painting. If your interest is something else, music, how does rhythmic thinking translate to mathematical thinking.

RS: Katherine helped open a vista?

KC: Yeah, I mean, Katherine as a teacher was just very encouraging of me addressing the problem or any problem in a way that just made sense to me. It didn't have to be some way that came out of our textbook or something that everybody else in the class was doing. I think a lot of times you have-- you have a math class and the teacher gets up on the board and tells you how to do something. That didn't really happen in grade 9 for me. What happened was Katherine gave us some problems and we had to figure out how to do it on our own. So consequently being in a class with a bunch of other really smart students sort of, that was also a really good environment for me, because I was able to figure out how I would solve the problem. and then I got to hear how 10 other people did the problem. And I started to think hm, what can I do, what can I take, what can I you know, do to make my problem-solving methods more efficient. And I really liked that Katherine sort of structured the class in that way.

RS: Math is beautiful?

KS: Math is beautiful. It's lovely. It is one of the most aesthetically satisfying things I've experienced. 

RS: Black and white?

KS: No. 

RS: Why? Is there always an answer?

KS: No, there is not always an answer. There is a fascinating area of work in mathematical logic that includes a result called girdles incompleteness theorem and it talks about how you can axiomatize a system. And, well, it's a long story. This issue about is it black and white, is it complete, is it not complete, has long been studied by mathematicians. Mathematics is beautiful in different ways to different people. Kendall talked about typology earlier. Typologists, I think of as the artists of mathematics. They're always visualizing, they're drawing, they're thinking of how things are the same and how they are different. Algebraists, I think of as a little bit of the grammarians of mathematics. They're the people who in an English class would love diagramming sentences. And so, really, what's so attractive about mathematics is all the different ways you can bring your own mindset to it and then be enriched by seeing how other people bring their mindsets to it and to grow and possibly figure out things together that you couldn't by yourself.

RS: Is it ok to fail?

KS: Yes, mathematics in some circumstances is described as the art of failure. 

RS: Do you agree?

KC: Yeah it-- kind of hard for me to fail because I was actually last year I was in a class where they were teaching me to take a test. And obviously, when there's the pressure of college applications and all this other stress that sort of amounts when you're a teenager in high school, you don't want to fail, the idea of failure is the idea of not going to college not getting a job and dying alone and all of this horrible stuff. But I think the experience of sort of moving forward and accelerating my track in mathematics has led me to believe that really challenging yourself is more important than taking the easy road. And when you challenge yourself you're increasing the likelihood that you will fail. However, if you're a resilient person, and that's what I really strive to be, failing won't have a negative impact.

RS: What do you hope for Kendall?

KS: I hope she finds a way to bring that joy and passion into any of her life projects. 

RS: Does it have to be math?

KS: It doesn't, it doesn't have to be in mathematics but I wouldn't object. 

RS: You agree?

KC: Yeah, I really don't know what I'm going to do within college or as an adult. But yeah, if I can enjoy everything else the way I've sort of come to enjoy math, that would be satisfying.

RS: Ramanujan? 

KS: One of the best things that the book and the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity brought out about him and his life and his work was his ability to embrace failure. The point of having brilliant insights and not being able to do anything with them is really pretty sad. So he struggled really hard to formalize his mathematical work. That's great, that-- that the joy in the work is not so much about having the brilliant insight, it's doing the methodical hard work every day to try to formalize it, to understand it, to make it relevant to the rest of the mathematical enterprise. The point is communication and collaboration, not being an isolated genius.

RS: He intuited most of his formulas?

KS: He did. That's my understanding too. He had extraordinary intuition but nobody else knew how to use his formulas or if they were right or if they even made sense. So the task, after the insight, after a moment of glory, is the joyous hard work to see how it fits together with everything else to communicate.

RS: Proofs, what's it like?

KC: It's really hard because the other day Katherine made me take the limit of a function as it approached a certain point. As the x-value approached a certain number. And I figured out the problem and then she asked me why. And I said to her it's because when you plug in the numbers it works. And when you put in the graph and the calculator it works. But, there is a way to express that using logic and there's a way to do it in a way that's concise and easy to understand. And I haven't gotten there yet. I haven't gotten to that level of communication. 

RS: How it's changed from Ramanujan?

KS: Well, the influence of technology varies according to the subject that I'm teaching. If I am teaching a class that is about exploring polynomials, exploring the behavior of functions, the ability to have a computer draw visualizations, and to vary the parameters in those functions, is powerful. It's a powerful teaching tool. It can help students who have trouble connecting the written language of mathematics to the visual language of mathematics. How do you see in the formula if the parabola opens up or opens down. Students who can't read that out of the algebra can explore online and start to make connections between the written language and the visual language. There's a lot of good in modern mathematical work in visualization.

RS: Paper and pencil still worthwhile?

KS: Absolutely. Well, let's see...

KS: Yes, so paper and pencil definitely engage I think a different part of my own brain. I think students can develop a kind of fluency with algebra by practicing longhand in the same way that you can't be a calligrapher if you don't spend hours forming each letter. Part of the point of mathematics is to communicate mathematical ideas which I think are inherently beautiful. So you have to learn the language in which those ideas are communicated. A lot of that language is visual. A lot of those languages are algebraic and pencil and paper.

RS: Notebooks? 

KC: Yeah. I guess, after school. Well, the idea of the pen and the paper, it's just, I personally feel like when I write something down it sticks in my brain better. And you know, teachers are constantly saying show your work. You have to be able to show everything you've done. And I think that really stuck with me because I've realized that if I don't show my work, as I said before, it's really easy to forget what you were thinking and how you can apply that logic to maybe another problem. So I think keeping those records is really important.

KO: I'm Ken Ono. I am the ACA Griggs Candler professor of mathematics at Emory University.  

RS: Tell me what got you interested in math.  

KO: Very long story. I'm the son of a mathematician. My father was a professor at Johns Hopkins for his entire career. And so as a young boy I didn't know that there are any other occupations other than being a mathematician. And so as a young boy he would play Math games with me. And by the time I was in college I learned that he even taught me some-- some theorems about number theory that I learned later as a sophomore at the University of Chicago. So I've been around mathematics my whole life.  

RS: Was this a passion of yours early on or did you just feel like a lot of pressure from your dad.  

KO: So as a young boy I have to say that math was like a game. I did geometry problems with my father. But at-- by the time I was in middle school I actually didn't really like mathematics, it seemed like a chore, and I hate to support a-- a stereotype, but as the only Asian kid in my school I was supposed to be good at math and I came to resent it. And I didn't become passionate about mathematics until my early 20s. 

RS: Light bulb in your early 20's?

KO: Well, as a college student I was good at math. I wasn't a great student and so I started college as a pre-med major but that didn't work out very well. So I ended up majoring in mathematics and one thing led to another and I ended up at UCLA as a graduate student in math. And I didn't love it, it just happened to be something that I was good at. But in graduate school in the early 1990s, a book came out called The Man Who Knew Infinity. It's a great book about this Indian mathematician Ramanujan, and I fell in love with a story, a story of this two-time college dropout, this Indian man, who I had known about for a long time but finally, as a graduate student I could understand some of his ideas and it was like arts, the flights of fancy that you might, or typically associate with poets or musicians, I saw on paper in the form of equations and that transformed my life.

RS: Under incredible parental pressure, how did you end up making peace with your upbringing?

KO: So as a young boy growing up in Baltimore in the-- in the 1970s, I was the only Oriental kid in school and I was expected to be from my parents, expected to be the top of the class, get straight A's, it was all about the mindless pursuit of perfect grades and high test scores. And that was tough for me. It was incredibly tough. I honestly don't know how I made it. It would be many years before I came to appreciate the talent that I have in mathematics, that certainly came from my father, and I think it took almost 20 years for me to come to peace with that. Because, for most of the first part of my life doing mathematics meant I better do well on this test because my parents are going to see my test scores or my grades. And it was-- it was about expectations which I knew were mindless. But I finally came to peace with that I would say. Almost accidentally, it turns out that I had great mentors, first at the University of Chicago and then at UCLA, who helped me begin to see mathematics as an art form not something that I was expected to be good at. And you know, as a-- as a graduate student you begin to pursue research in very specialized areas. And before I knew it I really liked and loved the research that I was doing, largely inspired by the kinds of questions that we were pursuing. And it turned out that I ended up having a number of incredible breaks along the way. And I ended up securing a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was basically where I was born. My father, as I mentioned earlier, was a professor at Johns Hopkins. He-- he escaped post World War II Japan and because he was very good at math and his first job was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, think Einstein you know, think (NAME), think the great minds. And for me to finally get a position as a postdoctoral mentor at the institute was something that I never thought would happen to me. And somehow when-- when I was offered that position, I felt like I had finally achieved the ultimate goal. And from that point on I could enjoy mathematics for-- for the art form, it was no longer having to live up to expectations. And you know, and I guess this is typical, it often takes many years, perhaps decades if one's lucky to come to peace with all that there could be a bundle of expectations you know imposed on you by your parents and for me, by the late 1990s we had come to understand each other. And for me, I finally understood the difficulties-- the difficulties that my parents had to endure as Japanese Americans and post-World War II United States. They had some very difficult struggles I'm sure you can imagine. And what I understand now is-- is that they truly believed that for us, the three Ono boys, for us to be successful we had to be the top of our class because they raised us in our little home in Lutherville, Maryland, where on the outside we went to school in America. But on the inside our parents are petrified and they really wanted to raise three academically, challenging, kids and they were very good at that.

RS: Why call math an art form?

KO: So it's funny. Mathematics is in my mind at least the kind of mathematics that I do, I view it as being much closer to poetry and music than, say, the science that might come to mind, labs and test tubes and microscopes. Why is that? Because, well first of all, when I do my work I don't even need any instruments, I don't even need a computer. I just need a pencil and some, and some paper, and some peace and quiet. The mathematics that we do is based on ideas. And what we look for are patterns in numbers which often end up becoming the model for patterns in the universe. So for example in my work, I can start talking to a graduate student or even an advanced undergraduate, or even a high school student, the kind of students that we're going to be talking about, I can begin to talk to them about the mysteries of the prime numbers. The numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, the numbers that are only divisible by 1 in themselves. And within a half hour, begin to explain how some of the mysteries of the primes are only glimpses of ideas which we now use to study black holes. Ideas that we use to make the internet work better. And I think that's beautiful.

RS: It's almost spiritual. 

KO: There is a-- it's very interesting that you say that. Mathematicians, we might invent the symbols, we might even invent the terminology, but the numbers exist whether mankind ever existed. And so, if you do the work that I do, whenever you answer a problem, you discover that there are many more problems that are uncovered because you've solved the problem. And that deep, intricate structure makes you have to believe that there's something very spiritual going on. Underlying how the universe and how numbers are required to behave. There's an order, an order that we as mathematicians can only get hints of but we will never truly, completely master. And I think that's amazing.

RS: Is there a natural beauty to math?

KO: There is a natural beauty to math. Now, I regret to say that mathematics often requires language that can seem quite uninviting to those who don't study mathematics, but I assure you, a lot of the ideas are quite beautiful. So I can give you a number of examples. Maybe I'll give you one example. This is a very famous story about Gauss? As a young boy, Gauss was asked to add the numbers one to one hundred, one plus two plus three... And if you had patients all the way up to a hundred, and there is a brilliant solution to this, and his brilliant idea was well let's just make the problem quite simple. There are a hundred numbers from 1 to 100. You can add the first one the 100 or the largest one 100 to the smallest one, one to get one hundred one. You can add, pair up two with ninety-nine. They still add up to 101. You can pair up the three with 98. They still add up to 101 and the recognizer has to be 50 pairs. So instead of adding up the numbers one to one hundred, one hundred, one to 100 in a painful way, you just recognize while there are 50 pairs of 101. So there you have it. Five thousand fifty. That's a beautiful idea. It's not a trick. And so, so I think that's amazing. Other examples of how mathematics can be beautiful actually exist in art. In fact one of Salvador Dali's most famous paintings about the Last Supper, Jesus's Last Supper, which resides in Washington, it's very famous, is really a mathematical formula in disguise, and it embodies a number called the Golden Ratio which can be described in a complicated mathematical way. It's number one plus a score of five over two. But it's really quite pleasing in that, many beautiful objects from this painting, to the cross-section of the chambered nautilus, to ratios of dimensions and the Mona Lisa, and various famous Greek buildings, for example the Parthenon, seem to embody this number and in particular even the harmonics on a violin. The ratio of where you place your fingers on the violin that-- that produces the beautiful harmonic tone, embody this number. And so, while the golden ratio is an example of a single number that seems to appear over and over again in music and art, which we find beautiful with our eyes, with our ears, and to a mathematician with pen and paper and terms of a formula.

RS: Math scares people.

KO: Math scares me. So, why is it that math is scary? I think math is-- can be viewed as-- as quite scary, largely because of the way it is taught. Now-- now I'm not a math educator so I don't really want to go into how math should be taught, but math is scary often because people remember their days in middle school and high school, thinking of those nightly homework problem sets where they had to solve one through 50 odd, solve these algebra equations, or solve these trigonometric equations. It's not fun. And something that isn't fun could easily-- easily be viewed as hard. And by the way, if you want to learn to play the violin, I think that's hard. If you want to run a marathon you don't just decide to do it, you have to practice. And so if we agree that-- that tasks that require practice are hard. Well, I'd be happy to include math like anything else, as things that are worth mastering.

RS: Does math frustrate you?

KO: Math frustrates me. Absolutely it's it in a year, I probably only succeed on four or five problems a year. And that's not for lack of trying. I spend hours every day, even on Christmas I'll spend some time thinking about a problem. And the reality is most days I fail. I fail in terms of the math problems. I'll succeed hopefully in other aspects of my life, but math is very frustrating. But it's because of, it's because of the fact that it's very frustrating that when you finally do succeed, it's so and, it's so thrilling to-- to overcome obstacles is something that I think all of us can understand, whether it's training to complete a 5K or a marathon, or finishing college any-- any journey which is hard is thrilling when you finally reach the finish line. And in that way mathematics is one of the most frustrating but enjoyable things I've ever done in my life.

RS: Is it ok to fail?

KO: Is it ok to fail, I don't think you can succeed unless you do fail. You learn from your mistakes, whether it's in mathematics or relationships with people. Failure isn't something to enjoy. But at the end of the day, it's something to embrace. 

RS: The computer revolution?  

KO: So I have a-- I have a computer. I have a smartphone. But the reality is-- is that-- is that I don't really need a computer to do my research. I need a computer so that I can send email to communicate with everyone else, my colleagues and friends. But in my day to day research apart from word processing, I don't need a computer at all. Occasionally I will run some modeling experiments to test an idea, but to be quite frank, I have a small army of graduate students who are great computer programmers who do that for me. But even if, even in the absence of a computer I think-- I think we would still be able to do most of our work.

RS: Through pen and paper. 

KO: Through pen and paper and chalkboard. (INTERESTING) But that's the nature of my work. There are other parts of mathematics where-- were the subject would be literally unable to proceed without a computer. If you were a mathematician who was modeling the heart. While your mind can't model something as complicated as the heart and so advances in computer technology are vital. In fact, those advances save lives, they help make MRI machines better. They make it easier and aid doctors in terms of deciding for example, where to place the stent and the heart that's the result of real mathematics. The mathematics that I do, doesn't rely much on the computer revolution. But that isn't to say that there aren't others that are-- that are close to me in terms of research expertise, who really demand having a powerful computer. 

RS: A need for passion in math beyond just hard work?

KO: Well, I'm trying to remember the source of that. I can't remember it now but I think I know what that's referring to. We live at a time where access to information is expected to be immediate. People look up stuff on their smartphones and expect information within seconds. In fact, some people are impatient, if you don't get an answer to a question in Google within a second it's-- it's like slow. Remember, I grew up at a time when we had to walk to the library, walk through the stacks and search through books page by page. Now how is that related to passion, that's related to passion because many of our young students today, I see them here Emory most of the students. confuse mastering a subject with the ability to access information quickly. We live at a time where students often mistake what science is. Science has become an industry where-- where-- where students and techs and-- and research scientists slave away in laboratories making slow progress on questions which often don't really address the main difficult problems. Now this kind of research is of course important. The future of society depends on good science. But what I'm referring to in that remark is something completely different. We need those minds that propel science forward. We're not short of computer science majors who will be great computer programmers. We're not short of people who can solve differential equations, that-- that are taught at the best-- at the best schools. What we are short of are the next generation of Einsteins, Newtons, and Ramanujan. The people whose ideas really propelled generations forward. For young students, my son and my daughter included, they view some of the great entrepreneurs, people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, as being this generation's Einstein. The Newtons. And in some ways yes, but in terms of pure creativity, the kind of creativity that I think we need if you want a solution to-- to green energy, or our exploding populations, that's I don't know where those ideas come from. But I do know that they're probably going to come from a passionate individual who will come up with ideas that will transform society. 

RS: How do you define creativity. 

KO: Well, creativity is actually quite difficult to define but very easy to recognize. A creative person comes up with solutions to problems or ideas that are so foreign that-- that their ideas transform an entire discipline. Think of it this way, people win Nobel prizes in physics for confirming predictions that Einstein made one hundred years ago. That's pretty transformative. Einstein's ideas are transformative.

RS: Inspire the next generation?

KO: So the next generation of math, how do you inspire genius? That's actually a great question. As a professor, as a teacher, I cannot manufacture a genius. If there is a way to do that tell me because you know, I'd love to do it. Genius cannot be taught, it can only be supported, it can only be searched-- it can only be nurtured. Real creativity is not something that's taught but it's something that is easily lost. There are brilliant people I think all over the world, there's a genius all over the world, but they are often outliers, they are often so-- so far ahead of their classes that-- that their teachers don't know what to do with them. And I think in terms of inspiring the next generation, it's important to know that the opportunities will exist-- that the opportunities exist, and that it's OK to be very different from others around you because at some point that will be a true asset. So let me summarize that again. How do you inspire the-- how do you inspire a genius. We don't manufacture genius. Society can only lose genius because geniuses tend to be outliers. People who don't fit in. And I think programs such as the Spirit of Ramanujan I hope, will go some way to first detecting genius, and then nurturing these-- these young students all over the world. So that they know that their gifts can be potentially put to good use in the future.

RS: Curiosity? How do you keep it?

KO: So-- we currently struggle with a very inelastic educational system, certainly the United States, and actually worldwide. People often mistake talent in mathematics for a strong SAT score. People often mistake strength in mathematics for how quickly you can solve problems. Almost like if you can solve the Rubik's Cube in under a minute, you're somehow a math genius. And these are things, these are skills that you can learn, that we can train. So to answer your question, how do we-- how do we inspire or foster curiosity, well I think it's by offering special programs where-- where the-- where the point of the program isn't to master the volume of work. but really to inspire people to learn how to ask questions. Also to learn how to be critical thinkers. Namely when, if you could teach a student to read a math book and then write a criticism of the book which resulted with, I learned these topics from this book, but what I didn't learn turns out to be this set of questions, then I think we've, then I think we would have done-- done something quite amazing with the student. You see, students often think that the professor or the teacher is the-- the master of the topics that are taught, almost as if there are no questions that anyone would ever want to ask in mathematics or in science. And for me as-- since I was a young boy, I already understood that asking a good question, or beginning to-- to understand what people don't know, what they wish they knew answers to, was a skill well worth developing.  

RS: Ramanujan.

KO: Ramanujan is by all means an outlier. I want his name to be viewed-- In Ramanujan we have someone who is really quite explicable really. He was a two-time college dropout who was born in South India and in the late 19th century, at a time when British was-- where India struggled, as part of the British Empire. It was a colony, it wasn't, it was very difficult to be Indian under those circumstances. But he was unusual in that, in that he had this gift for imagination. He wasn't properly trained. And-- and so what he had was this shabby book, it was a book which was meant to be a tutor's book for college students, and based on the formulas that he saw in this book, he came to believe that mathematics was done by assembling formulas. And amazingly formulas just came to him. While working in temples in South India. Or sitting on the porch of his home in this town called Kumbakonam. He believed that his goddess, a Hindu goddess named Namagiri, believed that Namagiri would just offer him formulas as gifts which he ended up recording in his notebooks. He recorded them in three notebooks that survive to this day. And I have to tell you, the mathematicians of the world are still trying to figure out these notebooks. So what we have in Ramanujan is someone who is not the product of any reasonable sort of typical education. We had someone who had ideas that came to him. And they were beautiful. So yeah. 

RS: He intuited these formulas?

KO: He had to. Ramanujan, although Ramanujan-- although Ramanujan believed that the formulas that came to him were gifts from his Hindu goddess, I'm not Hindu so I don't really know what to make of that. What I think is closer to the truth is that he kept imagining, he spent his days imagining beautiful relationships between mathematical objects that somehow interested him. And why these objects came to him, I don't know, but what I can tell you is that many of the objects he invented long after his death, we've discovered have become important for so many different things. How he intuited these formulas, I don't know, and how he anticipated what the future of his mat-- what the future of mathematics and physics would be, is beyond me. There's a spiritual element to all of that, but what is true is, and is quite remarkable, that in the three notebooks he left behind, leading scholars have been mining these notebooks and putting them to good use in the study of black holes, in the mathematics of the Internet, and in fact even in mathematics that helps power your phone. I can't explain that. 

RS: Cambridge tries to invoke discipline on his thinking? 

KO: Yes, so Ramanujan, as a two time college dropout living in faraway India, was recording these formulas and notebooks and he might as well have been living in a desert. Nobody around him understood anything that he wrote down. And out of desperation, I mean try to imagine that, try to imagine being passionate about a subject and not being able to share that with anyone. That would be awful. So in desperation he ended up writing to some of the most distinguished mathematicians in Western Europe and one of these mathematicians was G.H. Hardy. And Hardy, instead of ignoring the letter, actually tried to make sense out of Ramanujan's formulas. And he discovered together with his colleague, John Littlewood, that Ramanujan had to be a genius, at least a genius in terms of imagination and creativity. So Hardy arranged for the most extraordinary fellowship. He offered a-- a fellowship. To a two-time college dropout to attend perhaps one of the two or three best universities on the planet. Cambridge. Now Hardy was an atheist, Ramanujan believed his ideas came to him from God. Hardy was British and Ramanujan was a poor Indian. There was nothing about these two characters that sort of should have ever suggested they would have been able to work together. And in fact at the outset they couldn't. Hardy demanded and so did the rest of the Cambridge Faculty, they demanded that Ramanujan try to conform to the role model of the typical Cambridge math student without recognizing that Ramanujan didn't have any of the background that even the weakest Cambridge student had. So over the course of a year and two years, the first two years I guess Ramanujan was in Cambridge, the times were very difficult. They didn't see eye to eye. But over time Hardy began to see that Ramanujan truly was someone who could make fundamental advances to how mathematics should be done. And so there was a compromise, and Hardy became quite an astonishing mentor from that point on. And in fact, Hardy's best work, now that we reflect back a hundred years, were his papers with Ramanujan. And the ideas that they forge together still-- are still being developed today. How difficult was it for Ramanujan in Cambridge, it was very difficult. Keep in mind that England was in the midst of World War One, most of the students in Cambridge were off fighting this great war. Ramanujan was a vegetarian. I mean who was vegetarian in England and how do you get vegetables during World War One. And-- and so it's difficult to imagine how Ramanujan actually survived day by day during his years in Cambridge, but certainly for the mathematicians of the world we're so grateful that he did despite the very unfortunate and tragic ending to his life.

RS: Which came quite early.

Which came quite early. Ramanujan's life is-- is quite tragic. He left his family. He left his homeland. He left everything he knew. Because he wanted to share his mathematics with-- he just wanted to share his mathematics. He basically gave up his life for the opportunity to do it. He had five wonderful years working with Hardy despite the fact that he had few friends and he ended up living in a country that-- that was very foreign to him. And so it doesn't come as a surprise that-- that he would get sick, right. As a vegetarian, it was very cold in England, certainly for someone from south India. He became very ill during the latter half of his stay in England. The doctors diagnosed him with tuberculosis. We don't believe that was correct. And in 1919 he went home to India seeking a return to a more forgiving climate. And unfortunately although his health briefly improved it wasn't, it didn't last, and he died a year later after spending not even one year with his family. So he died in April of 1920. Which as you know makes me wonder, what did we lose as scientists, certainly it's clear what Ramanujan family lost, they-- but certainly from the scientific perspective Ramanujan died at 32. And given what we've learned from him from three notebooks and the papers that he wrote in England, try to imagine the mathematics that was lost by his early death.

RS: On par with Newton, Einstein...

KO: Ramanujan was an astonishing mathematician. He didn't develop theories like Einstein developed a theory or like Newton developed the theory of gravity. Instead, what we have in Ramanujan was a visionary who left behind thousands of mathematical formulas. He left them behind in his notebooks. These were for him to eventually write up, we presume, in the form of papers and books. He didn't live long enough to do that. And so we're still trying to catch up. But what I do know is that hundreds of his formulas have ended up serving as prototypes for theories that the mathematicians of the 20th and 21st century have gone on to develop. In that regard, he has propelled mathematics and physics forward by decades. I mean a brief scan of-- a brief scan of some of the breakthroughs in science that make the news, think black hole physics, the distribution of prime numbers, a lot of these advances stand on the shoulders of some of the theories developed by people who are just trying to understand Ramanujan's formulas. And so without Ramanujan, what would we lose, the amount of science that we know now that would be lost, that's something I can't even begin to fathom.

RS: So if Ramanujan had never lived...

KO: If Ramanujan had never lived, I don't know what I would be doing for a living, number theory would be decades behind, and you know, there are-- I mean I don't want to-- I don't want to say that certain results would not be known today because it's hard to predict how subjects would have developed, but it's certainly the case if Ramanujan and had not lived, number theory would still be-- Hm. I want to get this right. This is an important thing. If Ramanujan had never lived. there's an entire field-- there are entire fields of mathematics and physics that would have never been invented. 

RS: His legacy?

KO: Ramanujan's legacy-- Ramanujan's scientific legacy is-- is almost unparalleled in mathematics. Most great mathematicians were known for developing a single field. But in Ramanujan, we have a mathematician who left behind formulas that have inspired number theory, combinatorics, representation theory, mathematical physics. There are almost no areas of mathematics that have not somehow been informed by some of his formulas.

RS: You have a personal connection through your father...

KO: I first learned about Ramanujan in April of 1984 when I was in 10th grade. And a letter came to the house in really shabby yellow paper. A letter came to the house from India. And the letter, when I gave it to my father, stirred up emotions in him that I didn't expect. My father's a very stoic man. And when he read this letter, this letter brought him to tears. He showed me the letter and it was a form letter. It was just a letter written to maybe 80 mathematicians around the world. And it was written by S. Janaki Amahl, a woman who I had never heard of before. It turned out that S. Janaki Amahl was Ramanujan's widow. And she was thanking 80-- roughly 80 mathematicians in the world for helping fund the commissioning of a bust in honor of her husband, Ramanujan, who had died 64 years earlier. And what I didn't understand about that was, well why would this form letter stir up such deep emotions in my father. So what I learned is that my father, who grew up in Japan during World War II, had a very difficult time for the Japanese. I mean try to imagine what it was like to be brought up in a society where you're told that your emperor is god, to have all of that crumble in bitter defeat. So it never occurred to me to ask my parents, well how did you end up transitioning from those circumstances, to ending up living in an upper middle-class life in Baltimore, Maryland, it never-- it never occurred to me as a young boy to ask about that. Well, it turns out that shortly after the end of World War II. The allies led by the United States, rebuilt Japan. It's a very well-known story. And as part of that, the allies wanted to rebuild the universities. And as part of that effort, conferences were arranged and one of these conferences was in mathematics and Tokyo. The best mathematicians in the world were invited and many of them came. And of course, the Japanese students and professors were starving, they were not only starving for mathematics, for the last many years because of the war, they were literally starving because it was post World War II Japan. My father was one of the poor starving graduate students looking forward to meeting these brilliant professors from Princeton and Harvard and the University of Chicago. While these professors were very impressed by the Japanese students, the Japanese students even spent what little money they had to-- to purchase suits to look presentable. My dad was one of them. And Andre Veigh, who was at the time one of the most important young number theorists in the world, was one of the distinguished speakers. And he was impressed by this hunger that the Japanese students showed him, because it reminded him of himself. And he already had a very interesting story. One evening at that meeting, Andre Veigh, decided to give a special impromptu after-dinner lecture, wanting to inspire the Japanese students. And who did he talk about, he talked about this Indian mathematician named Ramanujan, who he had been himself studying and was trying to formulate conjectures which would later make him famous. Well, Andre Veigh made my family's life possible because my father was one of the students that impressed him. And Andre Veigh recruited my dad to be one of his student assistants at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which was where I was born. And that day in 1984 when that letter came, was a time when, it came at a time when I was constantly fighting with my parents about not wanting to do more math problems. And that was a breakthrough moment for me. You see, that letter reminded my father of what it was like to be young when you didn't know what your future was. They didn't know if they would ever have lives in academia much less you know, the lives that ended up having. And he remembered just having someone wanting to believe in him. For the content of his character and his willingness to work hard and you see my parents thought it was all about getting good grades. And for me in 10th grade that letter was sort of like a godsend because I'd never really heard about Ramanujan. And I learned about this two-time college dropout who was somehow instrumental in everything that my dad had become, paving the way to the great lives-- lives of privilege that we've ended up enjoying. And in 10th grade I think my father finally understood what I was like when I was young, maybe my son doesn't have to be the straight-A student, maybe we should let him, offer him some freedom and see what he becomes. And you know, amazingly I dropped out of high school, which I guess we would call a gap year now, but I really literally dropped out. And went to live with my brother who was-- who was at the time a graduate student at McGill. He's now president of the University of British Columbia. He's-- I'm very proud of him. And he nurtured me when I needed some healing and-- and so you know, do I have a special place in my heart for Ramanujan, absolutely, because if Ramanujan had never lived, the science would be lost. and if Ramanujan had never been discovered, well I don't know where my family would be today, I wouldn't be here. My father perhaps would have never ended up becoming a mathematician in this country. I can't even begin to fathom what my life would have been like.  And that's kind of amazing.

RS: The Spirit of Ramanujan math talent initiative. 

KO: The Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative as a global search. What if Ramanujan had not written out to Hardy, or what if Hardy had not responded and-- and seen -- and noticed glimpses of genius and those, in that first letter he wrote. Well, that's a world I cannot fathom. We made a film called The Man Who Knew Infinity. And during the many trips that we took to promote the film, I met the president of the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Andrew Serazin, and he was really quite inspired by the story of Ramanujan, this great genius. And out of our meeting we had this idea that because we had the strong belief that genius exists and resides all over the world, that we should use the story of Ramanujan to search for this talent. So what is this, it's an annual search, we've now completed the first two searches, and what we aim to do is to find outliers and offer monetary gifts, fellowships, to help connect these outliers with scientists and innovative programs all over the world. We want to be the Hardy for-- for those brilliant students who are working in isolation. It's our way of paying forward, that's our way of paying forward the wonderful things that have happened to us. That we've that we've enjoyed.

RS: How do you identify these youngsters? 

KO: So how do we identify these outliers? Well, first of all, we have to reach communities all over the world. There's this logistical component. And so the Spirit of Ramanujanis a competition, or a search, that's a better term. It's a search which uses the Internet, and the ubiquity of cell phones as its platform. We have partnered with the art of problem-solving, and a company called XP, headed by Po-Shen Loh, who is the coach of the U.S. Math Olympiad team, and the idea is that we want people all over to all over the world, to-- to participate in and to solve problems. And questions that are, that are posted on these sites. And we want people who participate in them to tell their friends and we hope the search snowballs from there. How do we identify the outliers? Well, we invite people. We invite everyone all over the world to submit examples of their creative work, whether it be an essay about you know, a mathematical formula, or maybe a theorem they've proven, or ideas for solving green energy. We want to-- in these-- in these applicants, basically assemble a dossier, sort of like Ramanujan's eight pages of formulas. And we have a committee of distinguished scientists that will review these applications and make awards based on what we find in these essays.

RS: How many so far?

KO: In the first two years we have identified 15 or 16 winners and they come from all over the world.  

RS: Cash award?

KO: In the first two years we've made I believe it's 16 awards. We made an award to a student in Qatar, a kid who invented his own formula for pi. I know lots of formulas for pi, but when you know. when a 12-year-old boy in Qatar comes up with the formula for pi you've never seen before, that gets my attention. We made an award to a really incredible young man in Kenya. As well as students in other countries as well. What do the winners get? Well, it depends. In some cases, the winners want access to books. Books in India or Africa are very expensive so we'll send entire libraries of books. But in most cases, the awards have been monetary fellowships, monetary grants, to help facilitate a research experience that connects the outlier with a professional. The boy that we funded in-- in Kenya is studying in Trieste, Italy, working with some of the best mathematical physicists at ICTP. And some of the other students we-- we've-- we've linked to professors at places like Johns Hopkins, here at Emory, and elsewhere. And-- and then, and even other winners ask for support to travel to a country where they might be to participate in a fancy math camp. There's a program in Boston called Promise. There are programs - there are programs all over the world for gifted kids and some of our winners have used their monetary grants to make that possible.  

RS: Are they geniuses?  

KO: I don't like to use the term genius loosely. Right. Salvador Dali, he was a genius. Einstein was a genius. Newton and Ramanujan, they certainly also by all means fit this description. It's very difficult to call students who are quite young, difficult for me to call them a genius because then what do we call Newton. That these are students and young people with great promise, a promise that I think we have to believe in and invest in because I think some of them will ultimately deserve to be called a genius. 

RS: Do they show unusual passion. 

KO: Every winner, everyone that we have identified and everyone we will identify, will have some element of spark, something that grabs your attention and that can come in many forms. You see, to be a leading scientist, or a leading mathematician or a leading engineer, there's no one way of-- there isn't a single path. There are some minds that are so creative, so inventive, that you know you have to invent, I'm sorry-- invest in them. But there are others who have this ability to transport cutting-edge ideas in one field and make use of them in another. And you see glimpses of-- of genius where-- where a young person can make an analogy-- analogies and see connections that we don't see even though we're a scientist working in the field, that's a different kind of genius. And of course, there is something to be said for the-- for the hard-working student whose mind is like a sponge who has this ability to learn more and retain more than almost anyone else.  All of our winners have-- have extraordinary abilities in at least one of these-- in one of these ways. Well, I'm delighted to say that the plan is to I think triple the program from what we've done in the first two years, and I hope we grow from there. We hope to make I think 50 awards next year. And let's see how we do. 

RS: Future of mathematics what is yet to be discovered?

KO: For me, there is one special math problem. It's called the Riemann Hypothesis. It was posed in the mid 19th century by Bernard Riemann, who's very well known for developing much of calculus. In one short paper, he made a conjecture which is essentially about the distribution of the prime numbers that has inspired hundreds of mathematicians over the last almost 200 years. His single conjecture has grown into a large body of conjectures, that I think is the holy grail for pure mathematics. And if these conjectures are solved, will have implications to the real world. If we know a lot about how the number-- prime numbers are distributed, then people will have to rethink how the internet works. Cryptography, which is the study of-- cryptography which basically keeps the Internet, banking systems, and other related things safe and secure, are largely based on the fact that there are some mathematical problems that are too difficult to solve quickly even with the help of a computer. And these problems will be solvable if we solve the Riemann hypothesis. So for me as a scientist, I really want those problems solved, despite the fact that some of these implications might require reworking a lot of things that we take for granted today. 

RS: In your lifetime?

KO: I think it's very possible in our lifetime, in the last-- in the last few years there have been advances, which have shed light on these questions. I think a-- proof of the Riemann Hypothesis is possible in my lifetime.  

DC: I'm Dean Cureton, I'm thirteen, I'm in 8th grade and I go to Westminster. 

RS: Always had an interest in math?

DC: Well I think math is probably the most pure subject out of all the sciences, and that really interests me because there's no-- there's nothing that's just like, there's no-- barely any exceptions to math. Everything is all logical and it's easy to understand once you get the concepts. That's what drew me to math in the first place. 

RS: Science too?

DC: Science too, mostly science. There's some that-- science is a little bit less pure than math, but I think it's still very logical overall. So that's also a good thing about science. 

RS: Logic?

DC: I guess it makes it very easy to understand. In other subjects, a lot of the time it's subjective, so it's hard to know whether you're doing something right or wrong, but in math the answer is always clear, there always is an answer. 

RS: Grow up loving math?

DC: I think when I was really young I actually loved English a lot more. But then I think I transitioned to math about first grade or second grade, about. 

RS: Really young...

DC: Probably like in preschool, I used to like always like, I guess I would sing the alphabet all the time, I really loved letters when I was that young. But then math started to-- math was the thing that started to-- that I was sort of drawn to in first grade I think. 

RS: What kind of math?

DC: Well, I've mostly done number theory so I think that's probably the thing that interests me the most. But I am excited to try other new things and see if that hits me the same as number theory. 

RS: Such as?

DC: I think calculus and all of the other courses that I've taken so far at school or not necessarily at school, they're all, they're all good, they're all interesting, but they're mostly just like working through problems and you have to get through them. But in other subjects where the field isn't actually finished yet and there's still work left to be done, that's probably what will interest me the most in the future.

RS: Beauty in math?

DC: Definitely. There's-- it's everywhere in nature, all around us, the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. There's-- everything is always interconnected, there's always something that, whenever there's a fact, it's not just a singular fact, it' always has to do with something else that we already know. So that's-- that's something really beautiful, that definitely doesn't apply to other subjects.

RS: Beauty and math -- art and math?

DC: Yeah, definitely. I think in a lot of paintings and drawings, there's always some aspect, aspect ratio approximately five to three, the golden ratio, it comes up everywhere, and then yeah, that's-- the human body is also based off of that, and a bunch of shapes and everything, so that definitely has to do with art. 

RS: The Ramanujan award?

DC: Ramanujan is-- was just a legend-- he's a legend of mathematics. He created all of his formulas all on his own and it-- he derived all the formulas from Europe that took mathematicians thousands of years, and he did it all by himself in India. And that's, that really inspires me, because if he can do it maybe I can aspire to be-- and create some of the things that he did. Like a number theory.

RS: Also uneducated?

DC: Yeah, college dropout, everything like that. That's-- it shows you don't have to be extreme, you don't have to be a straight-A student all the way, so you can just-- just follow what you love, like he did with math. 

RS: Ramanujan still useful today?

DC: Definitely. Physics is just catching up to like what he did with math a hundred years ago. I think we were talking about black holes, that has to do with his work a long time ago, and once science catches up to math, people thought that what he did could never be applied to the real world, but science has caught up to his work and that's-- that's still applying today.

RS: What if there wasn't a Ramanujan?

DC: We'll never know. I mean, his work was so influential in many mathematical fields, that I guess there would just be like, a bunch of knowledge that we never would have figured out. 

RS: Science?

DC: Same as math, everything is logical, everything is-- it just makes sense. Especially physics, because there are so many formulas that are all interconnected. And there-- there's always a relation between two things, even if they seem unrelated. 

RS: Project?

DC: In the research experience for undergraduates, me and Katherina, we wrote a paper about polynomials that behave like the Riemann zeta function. Me and another student at Research Experience for Undergraduates ended up writing a paper about polynomials that behave like the Riemann zeta function. And that's a big step-- it had already been done, but we revisit it in another way and that's a pretty-- it's a pretty obvious question to think about, what are other things like the Riemann zeta function, which is so-- which is the key part in understanding the Riemann hypothesis. What are other functions like that that we can explore so we can learn more about the Riemann zeta function?

RS: What is that?

DC: It's kind of complicated. But the basic definition is, take an infinite sum of one over one to S, one over one to the S, plus one over two to the S, all the way up into infinity. Actually it's one over-- ok-- but yeah, and then that's basically it for the integers, but it can be extended to complex numbers and other types of numbers, and that's the basis for Riemann zeta-- Riemann Hypothesis.

RS: Understanding helps us...

DC: Well, the Riemann zeta function has a lot to do with primes. And primes are the basis of internet decryption, and keeping our accounts safe. So understanding the Riemann function is very important for, like, our internet safety and all of our accounts online. 

RS: You co-authored a paper?

DC: It was very interesting to be able to work with someone who had the same passion for math that I do, it just flowed a lot better because we could each feed off each other's ideas, and we could either work separately or work together on the same problem and either way, it was just a lot faster, that was a great experience.

RS: Did you publish?

DC: Yes. We-- it was in a math-- math journal that the other student had a connection to, so they published it for us. 

RS: Youngest to publish?

DC: I think so, the paper was mostly for high school students, but it might be the youngest. 

RS: Class with Dr. Ono?

DC: I don't remember a lot about it, but it was very interesting to be around a class of people that were older than me. Maybe it was a little awkward at first, but I started to get used to it after a little while. And it was very interesting, it was topics that I had studied with Dr. Ono. And that was just interesting to actually see him teach it to other students in the class. 

RS: Did you have questions?

DC: I did have a lot of questions, it was a-- I didn't really understand what they were talking about at first, because I hadn't studied it in depth but I started to get it, because he taught it pretty well.

RS: Other aspects of the award? 

(NOT SURE ABOUT THAT) 

DC: I think-- I might do the RU? again, but I'm not sure about any other aspects of the award. 

RS: Next few years?

DC: We're trying to sign up for a class at Georgia Tech about applied combinatorics, for 9th grade. I'm not exactly sure what we'll do in the years after that, we'll see how applied combinatorics goes and see what other classes are right for me. And then for science, I'm going to take AP physics in 9th grade and see how that goes. I'm not sure after that. 

RS: What is applied combinatorics?

DC: I guess it's just using combinatorics, it's just like choosing different things, it's mostly about probability and choosing things and applying that to real life I guess. 

RS: Do your friends rely on you for homework?

DC: I get a lot of late phone calls or texts asking to help with homework. 

RS: What do you do?

DC: I get a lot of late phone calls about helping with math homework, it's kind of interesting to relearn the topics that I haven't really formally learned also. And sometimes I really can't help them but sometimes it's pretty interesting to see what they're working on. So, I try to help as much as possible. 

RS: Other subjects?

DC: I like-- I take Spanish, I like Spanish a lot because-- I don't know, it's pretty interesting. I guess, maybe math and language are somehow interconnected, because I feel like I like to speak the language. I'm going to Spain in the summer and that's going to be really fun to speak Spanish with people who actually speak Spanish. But maybe they're connected because I feel like-- I feel like I can pick-- I feel like I've picked it up pretty easily so far.

RS: Instruments?

DC: I do, I really love creating music. I compose music all the time on the computer, I play the drums at school in the band, I play the piano, yeah, a bunch of instruments. 

RS: Continue with piano and percussion?

DC: Yes, definitely. Taking up a band next year, piano, I think I'll continue with that, even though I might not like it so much. 

RS: Sports?

DC: Yes, I love basketball, basketball is probably my favorite sport. I do cross country in the fall and track in the spring. And then I also play golf a little bit.

RS: What was it like sitting with undergrads?

DC: It was very interesting because they're all older than me, but at least they can-- they can appreciate the fact that I am studying at the same level of math that they are. So it wasn't too awkward because we all, we were all doing the same thing. So, I guess when a bunch of people, maybe they don't have much in common, but they're still studying the same thing, it's pretty-- it's a lot easier to connect than if they're just doing two different-- two separate things.

RS: Math in college?

DC: Definitely something math related. I'm not exactly sure but definitely something with math. 

RS: Internet generation. 

DC: The internet definitely makes it a lot easier to access information, access what other people have done, so maybe you're not like-- maybe you're stuck on a problem, it's so easy just to look something up and get help, and there's-- obviously it's a lot easier to calculate things that maybe-- it's a little too tedious to do yourself, and you don't-- it's not central to the problem to understand it, so it's a lot easier to go with that and see-- and just calculate things so you can-- it makes the problem a lot easier.

RS: Ramanujan -- Zuckerberg quote -- Internet?

DC: Well I mean, one book was all he needed, so the internet is like so, it's so many books compiled together, and maybe just-- maybe there's some people who don't have access to Internet, that they just have undiscovered talent, and that's what Ken is trying to do, Dr. Ono is trying to do, with the Spirit of Ramanujan Initiative. 

RS: What's next?

DC: I'm not sure, I'm excited to find out how much different it's going to be for middle school, and not only with-- not only with math but with other subjects as well. So that's going to be interesting to me to find out. 

RS: Why do you love math?

DC: I love the satisfaction of finally finishing a problem after so much hard work. And actually, just yeah, that's it. After you've worked through so long, and done so much work, finally figuring something out is just-- yeah, it's like yes, I'm finally done, I did it. Although it took so much work, it was worth it. That's probably the best feeling that you could get. 

RS: What is about math that inspires you?

DC: The way everything is so interconnected, everything is related to something else. There's always something left to learn. There's always something left to know. And just the way that-- there's no end to it. That you can just always keep learning, always keep discovering, that's great about math.

RS: Nuances in math?

DC: I think so. There's always a definite answer for most problems in math. There's no -- there's no way you can really misinterpret a problem, everything is just solid, set in stone, and that's the great thing about it, because if something has a few different answers, it's not always easy to agree on one of them. But in math it's like, as soon as you get it and you prove it objectively, everybody's-- everybody coincides, everybody agrees with what you've done.

RS: Your teachers?

DC: I'm taking online classes this year, so I don't really have a teacher, so I just work through the book and work on problems. But in the past when I did have teachers, they did really push me. Because last year I took multivariable calculus, and that was a really great experience, because I had a great teacher, she was really helpful to me, and that helped me understand the concepts a lot better than if I had just read a book or watched videos and answered problems.

RS: 8th?

DC: That was in 7th grade. 

RS: When do normal kids do multivariable calculus?

DC: I think-- it depends on if they've taken the AP, but if you've taken the APBC, I think it's your first year of college. 

RS: Ramanujan, vision from God. 

DC: That was really interesting, because I guess math and religion aren't normally connected, they're not really viewed as related in any way, but Ramanujan, he definitely saw a connection between them and maybe that was what made him like, so I guess enlightened in terms of math, maybe he thought, maybe he really believed that someone was giving him the formulas. And that made him pursue math more, work harder, just so he could I guess, get more and see other formulas, be enlightened more.

RS: His professors pushed him?

DC: I think Ramanujan, he never really had written proofs before, because the book, I think the one book that he got, never proved anything, it wanted the reader to prove it, it wanted the reader to prove the theorems on their own. Maybe that was what influenced him to only just create the formulas, and not necessarily know if they're true or prove them. But what's crazy is, with only intuition, he still created that many formulas, he didn't even, he didn't prove anything, but they were still mostly all true. Which is crazy. How can you know-- it's crazy to me that he knew-- he knew they were true without actually like proving they were true. 

RS: His books?

DC: Not really, but I've definitely seen a lot of his theorems and things he discovered, not necess-- not from his books, just online. 

RS: Thoughts?

DC: I-- the first-- the most-- the craziest thing to me, he discovered that the partitions of certain numbers have certain -- are divisible or at least offset their modular-- it's kind of hard to explain. But he proved that they were all like, from-- they could all be classified in a certain way. And that's crazy to me how anything, how you can add up a certain number to be-- add up numbers to be a certain number, how it has anything to do with being classified with certain congruence classes, that's crazy to me how he even discovered that in the first place. He discovered like, ten of those identities at least. Which is really amazing. 

RS: Teaching math?

DC: That's really interesting, I obviously have tried to help people with math, I've tried to help my sister, although she isn't, she's not that cooperative. But it's interesting because teaching-- teaching-- it's really good, not only solving a problem yourself, but helping solve a problem with someone else, helping teach-- help to teach them. That's the same sort of feeling you get when solving a problem yourself, so I'm interested to see what I can do for teaching in the future.

RS: Satisfied when helping?

DC: Definitely, it's always good when you're helping somebody else, doing good for someone else, that's a good feeling. 
    

---

RS: Why did you choose Dean?

KO: Why did I choose Dean, well Dean is exceptional, he's really gifted, and it turns out that he came to our attention because of his participation in what we call the math circle and he's off the charts accelerated. So I met Dean, we met in the office, and were full of energy. And he's really quite extraordinary.

RS: What was inspiring?

KO: Well, in addition to being accelerated, which lots of kids are, what Dean has is this ability to very quickly follow deep ideas. So, we could talk about prime numbers at the board and I could illustrate an interesting phenomenon, and then it wouldn't be-- wouldn't be unusual for him to follow up with a question like, and so, what one could do is such and such. That's unusual.

RS: That's what you're looking for?

KO: Well, you can be exceptional in many different ways but one of the gifts that Dean has is this ability to ask a very good question which leads-- which is an important skill. 

RS: What about math interests you?

DC: Well I guess I love the feeling of finally getting the problem after working on it for so long. Obviously that satisfaction is always worth it. So, that's probably what interests me the most. 

RS: Particular issues in math?

DC: Number theory is pretty cool. I mean like, that's probably the only real thing I've studied, but so far it's been pretty cool to see how everything is interconnected and everything like that. 

RS: Number theory?

DC: Study of numbers, anything that has to do with like, I guess, I don't know how to explain it. (WELL) That's pretty much like, it can be really anything. Sort of. 

KO: Number theory is of course the study of numbers and the properties that numbers are required to satisfy, but that includes many things, such as problems like Fermat's last theorem, can the sum of two cubes ever be a cube. Can the sum of two fourth powers ever be a fourth power. Building on the age-old theorem of Pythagoras that A2 + B2 = C2 when A,B, and C are side lengths of a right triangle. That sort of phenomenon for other powers never holds again, and that's the kind of deep question we might ask in number theory.

RS: Beauty to math?

DC: Definitely, it's everywhere. I mean, one obvious example is obviously the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. That means everywhere in nature, everything like, everything in nature has-- has something to do with that golden ratio. So that's probably one of the most obvious examples that I would think of. But that obviously is everywhere. 

RS: Math in terms of beauty or science?

DC: It's obviously a combination of both. I think there are many aspects of math that are really beautiful, like the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. But there's also a more scientific part of it, like actually studying the properties of numbers that may not actually come up in nature.

RS: Ramanujan?

DC: Well I mean he's obviously a-- he's a legend in terms of the math, mathematics, and he is so, there are so many stories about him what really amazed me about him is like, how he-- he completely rediscovered all of the formulas that mathematicians in Europe had-- they had to, they took so many years to figure out and he did it all on his own in India. So, I mean, he's just a genius overall, he's just amazing in terms of his vision and everything that he came up with.

RS: Does he inspire you?

DC: I mean, he's just such a great mathematician, he was such a genius, it inspired so much math-- math work. So many fields are inspired off the basis of what he did. 

(BACK TO HOW THEY MET)

KO: So I first met Dean because he ended up in my class, I think it was three-- what three years ago when you were at nine or something like that. Showed up to class in advanced math class here at Emory, and this little boy is sitting in the front seat that's you three years ago, it's not like you're very big yet, next to your mom. And your legs are swinging under the seats like that. And I started lecturing, I think about Framat's Last-- no, Framat's little theorem I think, and as is typical in a class that I would teach, I like to ask questions of the class. The class wants to participate. But within 15 minutes nobody wanted to participate which is unusual for my class, because Dean is answering all the questions. Who is this boy whose hands go up immediately answering all the questions, so that's how I first met Dean. And I've never seen anything like that before in my life and I've been a professor for almost 30 years. 

RS: Dean's future in math?

KO: Well as a nine-year-old he was already performing at the level of our very best here at Emory, and so in terms of raw talent, that speaks for itself, but what he exhibited there is more than youthful enthusiasm, it's the ability to see where the research leads, which is the kind of questions that I'm trying to ask to cultivate my students. And he was basically on fire then and he still is.

RS: The award?

KO: Dean won one of our Spirit of Ramanujan fellowships and...

RS: Which means?

KO: So last summer he was in our undergraduate research group. He spent the summer writing a research paper on the Riemann hypothesis for polynomials and it was a great piece of work. 

RS: What was that like?

DC: I actually work with her I think. She's a high-schooler.

KO: Another winner. 

DC: It was really interesting, I had never really done anything like that before. Never really collaborated with anyone on math. So yeah, it was just an amazing experience because I didn't know what it was like. So now I have a taste of what happens...

RS: What was it like?

DC: It was really interesting to just collaborate with someone because we could share ideas, we were both passionate about math, and it was just great because when someone, maybe if someone didn't have exactly an idea of what was going on, the only one just pick it up, so it was really a lot smoother than working on your own. That was a lot better. 

RS: Importance of questions?

DC: An answer, I mean definitely. An answer means like, it's done. And it implies that there's nothing else to be done. But there's always something else to be done. So I think a question is way more important because even if it's not answered it can lead to many other--  many other important theorems, like the Riemann hypothesis, just a question. Hasn't been answered yet, but it's a consequence, like there's so many papers that are written that say if the Riemann hypothesis is true, so that question became more important than a lot of other answers that have already been solved.

RS: Does math frustrate you?

DC: Definitely. There's always-- you have to always work through something. And it can be very frustrating when you can't get a breakthrough. But always-- it's always worth it, of course. 

RS: Are there a lot of Dean's out there?

KO: The world is a big place, there are billions and billions of people on this plant, so are there many Dean's out there, there are some, we hope to find them. But in terms of a total count or a total percentage, we're talking about outliers, so we're talking about the very best in your state? Certainly, the top say 1% of the population, that's what we're looking for. 

RS: What do you hope for Dean?

KO: I hope Dean chooses to pursue a career in number theory and I hope he solves the Riemann hypothesis. 

RS: Will you do math as a career?

DC: Definitely something related to match, probably yeah, probably-- definitely something related to math, but I guess I'm not sure yet. But probably a mathematician. 

RS: Marketing took two years?

KO: First you have to sell the film before you can promote it to an audience, and so there was probably a half-year of film festival trips, we went to the Toronto International Film Festival Zurich, San Francisco, all in effort to sell the film. IFC Films eventually bought the film and released it, but they only released the film in North America, we have other markets in the world to sell to so I had to go to England, and I think you get the idea.

RS: Besides math?

DC: I really enjoy science. I mean, that's obviously really connected, interconnected with math. But so far I have a great teacher in science this year, and we've done physics and chemistry so far, and I had never really studied those before. And it's really interesting how everything just connects. Math connects to it, and chemistry-- it's pretty interesting. So that's probably my favorite subject this year. 

RS: Black holes?

DC: No, not even close. But yeah, we've been doing the basics of science and physics and chemistry. But that's been really fun this year.