The Logic of Math by Tyler

The Logic of Math by Tyler - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

The academic subject which I learned the most from in high school was Math because it is the basis of all practical knowledge I have needed and has helped me to grow in many other areas of my life. Math has given me the tools to continue my career path as a programmer in Video Game Design and to think logically about the world around me.

One thing I have learned from Math is how to think critically and how to apply logic to problems and situations. This has helped me in many of my other classes that I have taken in high school, such as English where we read multiple novels throughout the year and had to analyze them and discuss them in class. Although math can be straight forward in many ways, there are often instances that one must analyze the problem in a certain way in order to come up with the correct solution. The same can be said for reading especially when one is analyzing the author’s work and the meaning behind it. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box so that you can solve the problem. English is just one of the many academic classes I was able to apply this type of logic to while in high school but as I continue to develop my math skills I am beginning to see how important this knowledge has become for other things as well.

These skills in critical thinking and logic have continued to help me outside of the classroom too, most noticeably in my pursuit to further my knowledge of programming. Despite being taught programming in a classroom, I have taught myself a majority of the concepts I currently know on my own. To understand these concepts however, I had to apply critical thinking in order to even comprehend how a program would execute when dealing in higher level concepts. An example of such a concept is “event-based programming.” This is a programming paradigm, or programming pattern, in which a program has a set of code which triggers an event, and another set of code which executes when that event has been triggered. While simple in theory, it is usually quite hard to understand the flow of logic in these types of programs as the code never goes from start to finish and instead seems to jump around, making it difficult to read unless you think critically about how the program is executing. Even when forgoing high-level concepts like that, programs just naturally become more complex as they grow because the amount of code to keep track of increases at the same rate.

Because of this ability to think critically, Math has helped me grow as a person by giving me the tools I need to question the world around me and constantly search the truth. If it wasn't for math classes giving me the power of critical thinking and logic, I may not have been able to teach myself as many programming concepts as I now know, and I may not have done as well in my academic classes when it came to analyzing scenarios and situations.