I’m someone who sat through the slow-drip of middle school math, bored and daydreaming, Mom offers to stop by Panera as a treat for all the painful math that I’ve just endured. “Math Person” conveys – in ways both beautiful and haunting – the isolation Julia felt as one of the only girls in the American Math Competition 10th grade and, more profoundly, the intellectual isolation she still feels every day as someone who loves math deeply yet lacks a friend with whom to share it.
Julia Schanan’s entry for the Strogatz Prize was a free-verse poem titled “Math Person.” The judges were moved by the poem’s artistry and emotional power, its depth and raw honesty, its brilliant use of language, and its eye for the unexpected but telling detail.
