타고난 사람들 틈에서Among People Born for It

The classmates who appear in this episode are not named.

A Subject That Did Not Suit Me

It was at Cambridge that I felt I disliked math. It was when I had to study a subject that did not suit me. University mathematics was different again.

I first felt that difference in a supervision during my first term. A supervision is a class in which a few students sit across from a supervisor and talk through the problems they have worked on. Until then I had been someone who concentrated on solving problems, and nothing else. Korean math is built around multiple-choice and short-answer questions. What I struggled with was sustaining a written argument through an open-ended problem.

Mathematics at Cambridge is taken in stages: Part IA, Part IB, and Part II. Complete them and you receive a BA, and some years later, by convention, the MA. That is how I finished the Mathematical Tripos. This episode is the story of those years.

The People Who Were Mad About It

I remember the first time I saw a classmate who was said to be “born for mathematics.” Looking back, it was not that this classmate was born for it. It was a passion for mathematics beyond the ordinary. In the exam period, even over meals, the talk was still mathematics. Simply mad about it.

That friend was studying mathematics at every hour of the day. Cambridge had members of national IMO teams, the International Mathematical Olympiad, from country after country. And yet the person who came top was not a gold medallist. Natural ability alone could not explain what I saw. The way they approached a problem, and their attitude to the work, mattered enormously.

All-Nighters

I was a crammer by nature. Even so, in that short stretch I worked through a great many past papers. Before exams, being young, I stayed up almost every night. I was once caught sleeping in the library of the mathematics building, the CMS. I was called in by someone senior, whether the dean or the warden I could not tell you, who asked me why I had done it, and whether I had no home to go to. I said it was because I had been studying. The example sheets I went over again and again.

I am not recommending cramming. But even in that short time, what I did came down to two things: solving past papers, and solving the example sheets again. That is how I got a First in Part IA and became a College Scholar of Trinity College, a scholarship awarded for academic distinction.

The Hardest Part

The hardest part, as you would expect, was the exams. At Cambridge a whole year’s work is examined all at once, in one exam period. Just before graduation, for personal reasons, there was a year’s gap in my studies, and catching up again when I came back was hard. Long hours bent over books also brought on the early symptoms of a disc problem in my neck. I had a procedure for those symptoms recently. Loneliness never troubled me; it is not in my nature, so on that front I was fine.

Newton’s Book

If I had to name one place I remember, it would have to be the library that holds Newton’s book. Newton was a Trinity man. His book is still there in that library today.

What I Brought Back, and What I Left Behind

There is something I learned at Cambridge that I now use, unchanged, in a grade-10 classroom. Memorise a definition accurately, understand what it means, and apply it to a problem. Connecting those three steps deepens mathematical understanding.

There are also things that cannot be brought back as they are. A university class at Cambridge and an entrance-exam classroom in Korea are different environments. Population density and student-to-teacher ratios differ too. The Cambridge approach cannot simply be transplanted unchanged.

The Teaching Side

My path had leaned one way from early on. I had been teaching math for a long time, and I had felt that this work suited me. At first I meant to teach at a university. So after my first year I took the GRE Mathematics Subject Test with postgraduate study in the United States in mind. It was the mathematics test, not the general GRE. I scored in the 99th percentile, the top one percent. But for personal reasons I did not apply to graduate school. As soon as I graduated, I came back to Korea and began teaching math.

One Sentence

If I sent one sentence to my Cambridge self, it would be this: “All that time you spent going out to tutor, you should have spent a little more of it with people.”

Cambridge showed me how much method and attitude matter. Results were not determined by natural ability alone. I wanted to find out with my own hands whether that lesson would hold just as well in the unfamiliar, unforgiving world of Korean entrance-exam mathematics. So I, by then teaching students, became a candidate again. That is the story of the next episode.