Reflection
We picked Fan Chung as our mathematician because her name stays in your head, and it is quite impossible to forget once you started saying it over and over. Now that we have finished reading about her, we think that this name was actually “calling” us, and that we were meant to write about her because her life was actually inspiring for us.
When you see people juggling, you are absent-mindedly drawn to it, and won’t be able to help yourself from giving a little goofy grin, as the performer juggles more and more balls, and you wonder if any ball will be dropped. This was how we felt upon learning about the life of Fan Chung. She had to balance her family life with her professional life. She was even pregnant while attending graduate school. Right after giving birth, she was already eager to solve a graph decomposition problem, and within a month, wrote a paper on it. She was also able to perfectly combine her personal and professional life when she married Ron Graham, her colleague and a known mathematician. Normally, this type of marriage would lead to competitiveness, but in their case, they collaborated excellently.
As teenagers, we are so preoccupied with so many things, such as academics, extracurricular activities, friends, family, etc. Through her example, we can learn the importance of balance, because if we don’t one drop might lead to chaos. She even once told her granddaughter that “in this world, there are many opportunities like trains passing by. Only when you feel confident and are prepared will you be able to catch them.” We think we all know how it feels to be faced with so many new doors and paths, but we just don’t know which one we should take. Fan Chung inspires us to face these obstacles and fork roads with confidence and preparedness so that we’d be able to catch the right opportunities.
Also, like any great mathematician, she has encountered some challenges along the way. When she first arrived in America, she was faced with culture shock, and some of the smart women who also went to the US committed suicide. But instead of reacting to the queerness of her surroundings, she was proactive instead, and found a solution to her problems, and this was to marry early. Although it’s not the normal solution you’d think of, it worked for her, and today, she is a very successful woman mathematician.
Aside from these things, her life story made us realize that the things we are learning in math really are important for our lives. Who knew that several graph theories would be the foundation of the easily accessible technology we have today? We realized that the lessons we learn are interconnected, and if understood well, can be used for real life applications. Upon reading about her, we learned to listen well to our mentors, because they are our guide to a successful life. Fan Chung inspires us students to study hard, and to stay strong when times are difficult, (especially when math starts to get confusing because letters are not just letters, and numbers are taken into a whole different level), because this would eventually help us become critical thinkers and would greatly affect our future.
When you see people juggling, you are absent-mindedly drawn to it, and won’t be able to help yourself from giving a little goofy grin, as the performer juggles more and more balls, and you wonder if any ball will be dropped. This was how we felt upon learning about the life of Fan Chung. She had to balance her family life with her professional life. She was even pregnant while attending graduate school. Right after giving birth, she was already eager to solve a graph decomposition problem, and within a month, wrote a paper on it. She was also able to perfectly combine her personal and professional life when she married Ron Graham, her colleague and a known mathematician. Normally, this type of marriage would lead to competitiveness, but in their case, they collaborated excellently.
As teenagers, we are so preoccupied with so many things, such as academics, extracurricular activities, friends, family, etc. Through her example, we can learn the importance of balance, because if we don’t one drop might lead to chaos. She even once told her granddaughter that “in this world, there are many opportunities like trains passing by. Only when you feel confident and are prepared will you be able to catch them.” We think we all know how it feels to be faced with so many new doors and paths, but we just don’t know which one we should take. Fan Chung inspires us to face these obstacles and fork roads with confidence and preparedness so that we’d be able to catch the right opportunities.
Also, like any great mathematician, she has encountered some challenges along the way. When she first arrived in America, she was faced with culture shock, and some of the smart women who also went to the US committed suicide. But instead of reacting to the queerness of her surroundings, she was proactive instead, and found a solution to her problems, and this was to marry early. Although it’s not the normal solution you’d think of, it worked for her, and today, she is a very successful woman mathematician.
Aside from these things, her life story made us realize that the things we are learning in math really are important for our lives. Who knew that several graph theories would be the foundation of the easily accessible technology we have today? We realized that the lessons we learn are interconnected, and if understood well, can be used for real life applications. Upon reading about her, we learned to listen well to our mentors, because they are our guide to a successful life. Fan Chung inspires us students to study hard, and to stay strong when times are difficult, (especially when math starts to get confusing because letters are not just letters, and numbers are taken into a whole different level), because this would eventually help us become critical thinkers and would greatly affect our future.