Red and Blue

How I feel too warm for a math major sometimes… it’s like being a circle in a field of squares.

Sometimes, when I’m with certain people, for example some Caltech math majors, I feel too warm/soft/emotional/dramatic/expressive to fit in. Compared to them, I spend so much more time chasing feelings rather than facts. They’re able to study textbooks all day, soaking up more information than I could dream of holding in my brain. Meanwhile, I can’t separate myself from society for more than a few hours before craving social interaction, and I don’t mean just discussing math. As great as it feels, solving a math problem isn’t as satisfying to me as making someone happy is. When I look at someone, my first thoughts are always about how they are feeling. When I was young, I loved reading biographies of inventors not to learn about their inventions, but to learn about them as people (which I was always a bit ashamed of because I wished I had more natural curiosity about science). I want to learn from my TA’s and solve homework problems with my classmates, but most of all I want to understand people.

I don’t know how to explain it, other than red and blue (absolutely nonpolitical). I feel very distinctly red. I have a desire to light up other peoples’ worlds, and to have mine lit up by others. But at least in the math (and maybe also science) sphere, I think I’m surrounded by blue. The textbooks, theorems, problems -- people to a large extent -- are all blue. It’s like a winter wonderland, with pure, speckless sheets of snow, ice crystals with sharp edges and beautiful patterns, and infinite mountains of knowledge to climb. A night sky to search endlessly for the correct answers, which are buried inside like stars that you can pinpoint, zoom in on, and teleport to. I can understand why someone would love it here; if you were a snowflake, you would have everything you ever wanted: the ability to learn as much as you wanted in peace. And I’ve learned to love it too; it’s a core part of my life that I can’t live without. But I’m a warm-blooded animal, who has to recharge by visiting my warm, lively, subjective home every so often. Where we greet each other with open arms, smile and laugh, identify the value in every path, make sure each other knows how much they mean to us. Where you can see excitement rather than just knowing it’s there.

There are some people who light up my world, and I’d say that they’re red too. I can tell whether someone is red or blue¹, from whether they get excited by people or by knowledge. Maybe red people light up each others’ worlds and blue people light up each others’ worlds, and I simply don’t understand how blue peoples’ brains work -- how you could find everything you wanted in that winter wonderland, without desiring the warmth of a smile or a hug. I think the blue people are actually a very very small minority, but there just happen to be a lot of them at Caltech (and the math olympiad community too, I guess) and among the people who I happen to interact with. But because I interact so much with them, I sometimes try to be more like them, in some classes and when talking with them. I consciously smile less and act more serious; pretend that math and science is my whole life, and that the winter wonderland is the only place I know. In an alternate universe, I’m as dedicated and high-achieving of a math major as they are. In an alternate universe, my heart is as pure as snow, and the discovery of knowledge is enough to fill it.

¹ I don’t think there is actually this much of a dichotomy; I think everyone is somewhat of a combination.