An article about my love of math in a national newspaper in India

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Young Achiever: Gurugram teen wants to promote beauty of Math and its impact on everyday life

Rohan Jha is the inaugural winner of Steven H Strogatz Prize for Math Communication conducted by National Museum of Mathematics in New York


 For Rohan Jha (16), the passion for Math was fuelled by a short video that he made at his architect mother’s request. It was the summer following his IXth grade at the Pathways School Gurgaon, when Rohan made the short video on the Birch Swinnerton Dyer (BSD) Conjecture, a difficult millennium problem in Math, that changed his life’s course.

His father Pankaj Jha, a startup owner in India who had worked at the Wall Street for over 20 years, sent the video to reputed mathematicians hoping one of them might respond with encouragement.

Michael Harris, professor at Columbia university, wrote back saying that he would be delighted to have Rohan as a student when the time comes, while Benedict Gross, professor at Harvard University, sent him his lecture notes to improve his flair for the subject.

It gave Rohan, now an XIth grader at the Livingston High School in New Jersey, the confidence to start noticing the impact of Math in everyday life. He was fascinated that it was behind some of the music we play or how nature uses it for its own optimal benefit.

“In ancient India, for instance, poetry was not merely an art form but derived from sophisticated mathematical concepts that had to pass the test of Sanskrit shlokas. There was the short syllable (laghu) which needed one beat and long syllable (guru) which required two beats. Tabla players use a similar concept where they call a short syllable as ‘Dhin’ and a long syllable as ‘Dha’,” says Rohan who was inspired by his late maternal grandfather, a Sanskrit scholar, to see the link between music and Math.

“Poets had to determine how many beats per shloka they need and the combinations of short beat and long beat they can use. Mathematics provides answer to these questions. In nature too, many of the flowers have petals which also follow a mathematical pattern,” Rohan adds.

His passion for the subject grew with a Math club that he started at Pathways School where a quarterly magazine ‘Math Musing’ was also part of the initiative.

It was this magazine that became his entry to Steven H Strogatz Prize for Math Communication conducted by National Museum of Mathematics in New York where his project was selected as a winner in the writing category.

Ask him about Math phobia and whether he was ever its victim, Rohan recalls, “When I first moved to India at the age of seven from the US, I was way behind my fellow classmates. They were learning division, and I had just grasped subtraction. While trying to catch up, I fell in love with the subject.” Since then, there has been no looking back.

Presently, Rohan is in the US where only a month after starting school in New Jersey, students were put into lockdown due to COVID-19. “However, once school reopens, I plan on becoming more active in my pursuit of Mathematics,” says the soccer fanatic and fitness freak.

What makes his academic journey in the US meaningful is its emphasis on “independent thinking”, a reason why he can give a free rein to his imagination and make a seamless transition to college with plans to major in Math or a related field.

 Find on education times:- 
https://educationtimes.com/article/editors-pick/76320186/young-achiever-gurugram-teen-wants-to-promote-beauty-of-math-and-its-impact-on-everyday-life.html

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