<h2>How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.</h2>
<p>On one side of the room, the winners were scattering flakes of ripped scratch paper over the losing team for them to pick up. On the other side, people were furiously doing pushups in defeat. It was rather a ridiculous and comical scene. Some days I thought I was an idiot, other days I beat an International Math Olympiad medalist. However I learned that math was social and enjoyable, and that making good insights required learning other peoples perspectives. I eventually figured that empathy, while a trait most commonly used to judge feelings, could also be used to collect ideas. This was the true beginning that made me able to see many new connections in mathematics and research, and allowed me to envision beautiful ideas in my mind, where I could not before.
At UChicago, what were past Olympiads instead become problem sets in class, solved in groups as well. Collaboration becomes key. In my high school, we compete against each other, in the arms race from AP classes, SAT camps, and extracurriculars; there was no supportive environment for the happiness and fulfillment of pursuing ones curiosity, which I deeply desired. However in contrast, UChicago is a tight-knit community. Its a place where I can truly make real and close friends who I can trust as we grow together and help each other. Given a change from my home life as well, I can assure a much better academic record. Along with the research I have done and currently undertaking, I want to continue interning and doing research at UChicago, knowing endless opportunities. For instance, the REU and the VIGRE would benefit me well. I particularly like the fact that UChicago offers interesting research in topology as well as applied math, which ties in to CS.<br>
To gain and to give knowledge and opportunity is my goal. I never let myself pass as someone who merely accepts his perceived fate nor lets his horizons become locked. It became a sort of fight for my ideals as I realized how much prejudice there was against my background. Consequently, I became an outsider to others and my own family, and wisdom became a commodity not easily shared with me. I find that UChicagos philosophy of learning for the sake of learning and not for the grades a well fit for me. </p>
<h2>Instead for a long time, I learned my intuition about the world by luck. Like math, trying out methods, failing, and trying again with improved wisdom was the way out. From this pattern, I learned far more about myself. I realized fear of failure is what restricts the mind and keeps it into stagnation, but in perhaps my proudest accomplishments, I was able to slowly free myself from its confines. In the end, I want to gain from and give to the library of human experiences and knowledge and step into a bigger world.</h2>
<p>In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, pose a question of your own. If your prompt is original and thoughtful, then you should have little trouble writing a great essay. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun.</p>
<hr>
<p>The question Id like to propose is What is creativity? How can one learn more and more of it?
I would like to start out with a personal example. After school while waiting for a carpool ride, my friend Josh asked about a random algorithm. Interested in the problem presented, I tried to create an example to help. </p>
<p>This is a simple graph, with vertices (points) and edges between some pairs of points, This could describe for the particular application of this problem, a representation of people (vertices) on Facebook and their friendships (edges). Our goal is to cluster, or put each person into one of several groups, such that optimally, the number of friendships in a group gets maximized. Normally, this problem may be too technical, but I told Josh that with a bit of imagination, it can be remarkable.</p>
<p>I thought and thought how to present technical problems into very intuitive approaches. Knowing how Josh had taken physics, I made up this argument: You know how heat flows in all directions equally? Imagine if every edge had some amount of heat on it, and we let it flow on the graph, moving across all these edges. Then most of the time, the heat will get piled up in the places with the most edges, and that can be our clustering. Its a lot of technical jargon from here on out to visualize this, but Josh was amazed at the beauty of the insight: how heat and graph theory combine to solve these types of problems. </p>
<p>My rise in mathematics was very motivated by my surroundings at first. As a resident from a small town in Colorado, I struggled to answer with a good response about obtaining creativity, when others were pouring money into SAT camps and the like. It was a completely new phenomenon to me, after seeing how others could just think about things out of the blue so quickly. I chatted on G-mail with some of the top math students in the nation in high school, trying to gain insight into the workings of their minds. I first struggled at reading mathematical papers and literature. I and others solved dozens of hard problems when discussing ideas.</p>
<p>A particular quote I would like to post from a book:<br>
This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter… But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn’t recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn’t dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility [of knowledge] is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people. – Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!</p>
<p>While this creativity and problem solving can certainly be described into a simple Know how to apply your knowledge, I believe there is a far greater meaning in scientific endeavor. Most of the brilliant and beautiful insights have been made through connecting seemingly unrelated principles for a greater understanding; this is the opposite of vertically building knowledge through pure logic. From the example, no complex theories were truly required, yet it had such a profound result. People have done things in a context already set out before them, without any inclination to disturb. But what actually motivates anyone to seek out these connections and disturbances in the first place? As Feynman continues to say, Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing. To have a mindset for wandering around, desiring elegance, and trying new things without a fear or failure nor desire for prestige leads to this powerful statement.</p>
<p>I found this fragility of knowledge related to my experience in math olympiads and in research as well; it was only after experiencing both failure and a willingness to not be chained by administration nor the classroom that I began to see this. I realized that it is truly a pity to completely discipline ourselves to such goals, dampening the quality of our thoughts. Most of us seek a predetermined path or goal, and cannot thrive in cases of ambiguity. Humans seek clarity for their future, believing that there must exist some guarantee of reward or outcome from a consistent plan of actions, sometimes going as far as to define a sense of worth and self through these plans, becoming almost un-adaptable and inflexible. No such security exists, when we are expected to do something out of the bounds of human knowledge.</p>