Once upon a time, a little boy was born on the shoulders of giants. His mother was a famous literary analyst and writer, and his father was the rare wealthy adult fiction author. They named the child William Waldo-- William for William Shakespeare and Waldo for Ralph Waldo Emerson. The parents loved their child, and read him original bedtime stories every night, knowing that this child would follow in their footsteps.
As little William Waldo grow older, though, he discovered a love for mathematics. When you’re named after two poets, teachers tend to assume you’re paying attention during English class. But other than creative writing, William Waldo found that no topic could hold his attention outside of math. When the class used the textbook in first grade, he secretly slipped papers on fourth-grade math inside and read those instead. He hid a whiteboard under his bed, which was constantly filled with probability exercises-- his favorite subject. By the end of the year, he had told his friends to call him Will instead, throwing off his nominative shackle to his parents. He was all set to explore higher math.
Will joined the math team in third grade. Slowly and steadily he rose up the ranks, learning the types of math that most students aren’t lucky enough to appreciate. By fourth grade he had proven himself a fierce competitor against even middle schoolers, and by fifth he had unambiguously surpassed them. He discovered the joy of being the top dog, in a small competition-- which he attended without his parents’ permission, and which he won by a narrow margin of two problems. Fueled by the twin desires of winning and learning, Will studied at night (the time designated as reading time by his parents) to become the best he could be.
His best was actually quite good! Not only was Will on the team for the biggest competition of his sixth-grade year, he was the de facto leader. In fact, he viewed himself as a solo act. Sure, the occasional points were lost because Will insisted he was right over his teammates, and there was the odd bitter feeling here or there. But for the star mathlete, it was all casualties of war. Math to him was like a battle: attack the problem relentlessly from the right angle, and prosper from the spoils. If a friendship withered in the process, it was a small price to pay.
After all, the rest of the team was interchangeable. He was Will-- the Will, the “Calculator Kid”, the “Alpha Nerd”, the “Integrate-est” (admittedly the calculus jokes went over Willl’s head at this point)-- and surely as the greatest mathlete in the school he could solve the team problems by himself. At least, that’s what he thought going into the competition.
The structure of the Mathcounts competition is simple enough. During the first two rounds, competitors work individually on a total of 38 problems designed to challenge even the brightest of competitors. After a break for pizza, the mathletes then come together for the team round, in which they work together on ten problems. Finally, the highest scorers go to the main event of the night: the countdown round, a real-time one-on-one battle of wits where the whole room is your audience. Will wanted more than anything to have that glory— but he was sure he would make it, and sat down for the individual rounds with a sense of haughty superiority over the problems.
Problems cannot be scoffed into submission, though. Sure, most of them were second nature; in fact, he breezed through the first fifteen in seven minutes (a breakneck pace), letting out a chuckle as he turned the page. But #16 was not so easy. The sticking point was the mysterious number i, the square root of -1, a strange being that fell into the poorly named categories of “imaginary numbers” and “complex numbers”. Although Will had only heard mention of these names, he certainly felt that the problem was complex.
See, mathematics is merely the applying of creativity in ordered ways. Will had no idea where to apply his creativity, as he had never seen complex numbers before. But he knew that the problem would give him all the information he needed-- after all, he was the one and only Will, and he wasn’t going to falter here! So he danced around the problem, entering a dreamlike state in which there was nothing but the mathematics. No greed, no superiority over his classmates. There was only the numbers, the screws he was forced to hammer as nails, the devices his creativity would hammer until they fit. He jumped from angle to angle, attacking the problem with everything he could, but to no avail. Imaginary numbers had proven to stay his wit.
Will awoke to the timer’s buzz. “Time!” shouted a proctor, and the clamor all around him snapped him back to the world of humans. Will quickly guessed 69 for the remaining fifteen questions and sighed, handing his paper to a volunteer.
Poor Will went through the next round in a trance, answering the questions thoughtlessly. That is, until the final question jolted him awake again. It was another imaginary numbers question-- a chance at redemption! And to his credit, Will learned more attempting to solve this question than he had in two months of listening to lectures. But it was over before it had begun. Will trudged out of the cafeteria, paused to idly inhale half a slice of pizza, and found a shady spot to sit.
“I can’t do it,” the voice in his head said. “I’m not the best.” And for a moment once again there were no people, just Will and the tree giving him shade. Everything else was absorbed into a bright light where one shape was indistinguishable from another. Nothing else mattered. Will had failed.
“But I'm Will,” he thought aloud. “I didn’t sneak out of the house this morning to give up here. I didn’t change my name or fight my parents every step of the way to stop.” Inspired, his phone exited the blur around him as Will began to do research. Will deleted every last study guide he had, replacing it with papers on the imaginary number i. After all, he thought, my team depends on me. He didn't look up, but he heard his teammates, lazily eating pizza and chatting. Oh, he had to learn this now. His teammates were nothing compared to him: they surely didn’t know what i was, or what made complex numbers so complex. And the team round was next-- he had to know more, or they would suffer for his sins! He walked back into the auditorium feeling like a champion, armed with the knowledge of complex numbers.
The other three team members were huddled together when Will got to the table. He sat on the other side, allowing for plenty of room to set up scratch paper, adjust his calculator, and steel his spirit. But when the team round began, his heart sank. Not a single question on complex numbers. Not a single i, not a single Gaussian prime, not a single Riemannian anything. Will was, for a moment, lost. He tried to focus, but between his frustration, the whiplash, and the fact that he'd only eaten half a slice of pizza, he couldn't.
There was only one thing left to do. Will scooted his chair to join the cluster of teammates, in an act that asymptotically approached an apology. And with that, the rest of the auditorium went foggy once more, but this time his teammates were in his little world with him. And despite two broken pencils and a calculator battery giving out, they solved all ten problems on the team round. Will was overjoyed. That moment would stay with him for the rest of his long mathematical career: Will, the numbers, the teammates, the team round. And it was beautiful.
Will wouldn’t make it to the final round that day, although one of his teammates did. But he learned something more important than a trophy:
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There’s no i in team.
