Author Spotlight
Libby Marsh
Rather than walking to her sixth hour, sophomore Esther Walker leaves early from her choir class, skips lunch and takes a 12-minute car ride to SM North.
After allotting extra time to get lost and deal with lunch time traffic, Esther sits in the parking lot eating her lunch of Made Good Bites and a granola bar. Then she goes inside for her math class Calculus BC — a math class she should be taking three years in the future.
The lack of Stanleys and Lululemon bags in the halls make Esther stand out among SM North students.
“I feel like I stick out, awkwardly [at North],” Esther said. “I haven’t seen a single person with a Stanley, for example. And [on] the first day I was just walking around with my hands too full of Starbucks and a Stanley and a lulu bag, I looked really stupid.”
Even though Calculus BC is offered at East, due to a scheduling conflict with choir, Esther goes to North for math with a class of only seven other people, all a year older than her. And she takes yet another math class at East — AP Statistics.
“I feel like I recognize everything [in AP Stats] that we’re learning so far from other stats stuff that we’ve done in school before, and algebra and stuff,” Esther said. “So I feel like that one isn’t as demanding.”
Finding the derivative of sine and cosine graphs is usually a topic reserved for college students. The value of the imaginary number i is something people are introduced to in their junior year of highschool. Finding a complex theory discovered by mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1740 connecting the two is something far far outside of most students’ typical math track.
But Esther has already completed all of the above.
In sixth grade.
By fourth grade, Esther began to work ahead in math with a tutor and was often pulled out of class to work on sixth or even seventh grade level problems. That was when she began asking “What if…?” questions.
Esther often took these questions about trigonometry and imaginary numbers to her dad, Timm Walker, who would explain the patterns she saw in math — until seventh grade when she began asking questions beyond his knowledge.
“After basic arithmetic, she started taking an interest in asking questions about things like polynomials,” Timm said. “And [when] she would learn something, she would say, ‘Well, what if we did this,’ that kind of, inquisitiveness about math, and so she was definitely on her own, taking it the extra mile and really wondering.”
These questions, and her outstanding math performance, led her on the advanced math track, originally being set to take Algebra 2 her freshman year.
But, her eighth-grade geometry teacher Ryan Oettemeier — after receiving an email with a question about quaternions that even he couldn’t answer — decided that wasn’t advanced enough.
“She was very self driven, and she would explore concepts that were, what I assume were very, very high level calculus questions,” Oettmeier said.
Esther studied and applied her knowledge of Algebra 1 concepts to Algebra 2 — careful to avoid matrices because of a well established hatred for them — and took a test to skip the class. Now she’s taking AP Statistics and Calculus BC.
Despite her already-vast knowledge of calculus, according to Esther, a lot of her strengths come in “useless” fields, also known as “pure math.”
“I’m usually a lot worse at things that are real world things than [questions] like, solve this math problem that you’re never gonna see and you’re never gonna need,” Esther said.
After investigating a “useless” theory, Euler’s theorem, for nearly seven months, Esther was able to connect the pieces of math she had taught herself.
“I feel like [Euler’s theorem] helped me get a different perspective on [math],” Esther said. “I kind of taught myself everything that I knew about [the theorem] and so it just, [gave me] a better understanding of, everything that I had learned before when I did that.”
Esther will continue to ask these questions and learn more “useless” math concepts.
“It’s just kind of enjoyable, the problem solving and aspects of [math] and seeing how, especially learning different topics and seeing how they all fit together and everything,” Esther said.
Leave a Reply