Maths beauty earns place at Stanford
Katherine Yang wants to be an artist and an engineer — a pretty unusual concept for many people.
The former ACG Senior College student created art pieces for her Cambridge A level exams, which also combined the beauty of maths and physics.
She was accepted into a number of top universities around the world, but chose Stanford because she wanted to combine engineering and science with fine arts.
“I always liked the idea of maths, but I wasn’t very good at it,” she said.
“I wanted to understand how maths could be considered a fun pursuit. So I tried to see if there were any correlations between how beauty could be defined by art, if beauty could be defined by mathematics, and whether mathematics could be seen as beautiful.”
She previously struggled with maths because she “didn’t see the point” in it, she said, and “assumed that maths and science weren’t fields I could be creative in”.
But delving into the subject made her realise that she could be “very creative” in both.
“You can map a lot of what you can consider natural beauty and the natural world with mathematics and physics, in formulae and equations.” Her final piece included a mathematical equation, and outlines of planets and human biology. Helping children find the beauty in maths and the applicability outside school, would encourage more to embrace it, she believed, “especially in our digital age, where everything we interact with is mathematical”.