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Oct 31st, 2014
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  1. Mathematica Camp (n.): A two-week whirlwind of people you never knew you wanted to meet, information you never knew you wanted to learn, and a passion you never knew you wanted to pursue.
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  3. In math, there are no subjective answers. In an uncertain world, it is a welcome change. If I get a wrong answer, I can find out exactly what I did wrong and not make the same mistake again in the future. I programmed for the first time in ninth grade and there were so many different ways to do everything that I never knew if I was doing things right. It made me nervous. I took the class because I figured programming would be a useful skill; I completed it fairly certain I would not pursue it any further.
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  5. At the end of my junior year, I received a scholarship to attend Mathematica Camp as a prize from the Math Kangaroo Competition. It was free and it sounded like it would be about math, so I accepted.
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  7. Turns out, it was basically a Mathematica coding bootcamp. For our first programming challenge at camp, I was paired up with someone who, like me, had never coded in Mathematica before. However, he had plenty of prior programming experience, and as he flew through the problems, I felt hopelessly lost. His thinking process amazed me- the way that he could solve problems so quickly, and with such clarity and ease. And I wanted, so badly, to be able to do what he did.
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  9. We selected projects on the second day. Mine was on the construction of fractal patterns from polygons, a purposely math-intensive choice. The actual programming portion was fairly easy; I did the calculations on paper and inserted them into recursive functions.
  10. As a result of my project’s simplicity, I had a lot of time to kill. The instructors showed us an online set of programming problems, and I spent all my time working slowly but steadily through the them, searching for that proficiency I had seen first-hand my first day. The problems were easy at first, simply requiring me to plug values into functions- built-in bits of code- easily found in the Mathematica documentation. As the problems went on, more manipulation was required. At first I just threw things together and hoped I didn’t get an error. Through trial and error, my coding eventually settled into a rhythm: I began by breaking the different elements of the problems into functions, and then fitting together those functions much like a jigsaw puzzles; matching up parameters, checking types, pulling my hair out because that one letter was supposed to be capitalized and it wasn’t and no wonder my code was broken for the last hour and a half. So it goes.
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  12. Our final programming challenge was to create a method to sum the first n Fibonacci numbers without using the Fibonacci function in the least number of characters. I tackled it the same way I had countless other problems: I assigned functions to each task in the problem and the knit them all back together, one at a time. Surprisingly enough, I won the challenge.
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  14. Even more surprisingly, I realized that I found the most fun not necessarily in being told I was right, but rather, in the coding itself. Stretching my brain to its limits, smashing keys like I was playing Prokofiev, gripping the edges of my chair in those tense moments my computer froze before finally spitting out an answer- while I was coding, everything was the beginning of a world, or the end. It was exhilarating.
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  16. There is no right or wrong in programming. Math is an absolute science; programming is a practical art. In its relevance to the real world, programming is about problem-solving, about creativity, about racking your brains for whatever kind of solution you can come up with for a problem with no right answer. Math is about the results. Programming is about the process. It is a celebration of the human ability to create. In a carefully-defined world, it is a welcome change.
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