Beyond Figures & Formulas

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guess I’ll keep doing it.” Now, he thinks of math as his personal hobby.

Bhutani encourages even those who don’t yet like math to take a semester of calculus at some point in their education. “It doesn’t matter if you take it sophomore, junior or senior year, or if you take it in your fifth year of college. It’s acquired knowledge over time,” he said. “It shouldn’t just be like, oh, I took this class and I got an A in it, it should really just be what you get from the class.” Different people learn math at different paces; Bhutani doesn’t even consider what he is doing to be fundamentally different from taking Integrated Math II in Freshman year.

Bhutani doesn’t believe accelerating in math should be forced. He disagrees with parents putting pressure on their students to skip to higher levels of math for the sake of it. “It wasn’t like a thing like, oh, I want to take calculus freshman year. That wasn’t my motive.” He said he personally chose to accelerate because he wanted to get exposed to higher math concepts at a faster pace. Beyond the linear track of highschool math, there are several branches of higher math. “If you look at research in math, for example, your entire research field is one very, very, very specific topic in math that only one or two people in the whole world could understand what you’re doing.” He has already begun to take college courses online to get an introduction into some of those branches, one of which is abstract algebra. “It’s not algebra you learn in school. It’s called abstract algebra and it’s called that for a reason. It’s like a logical foundational aspect of the algebra you learn in school.”

For Bhutani, all of this started in fifth grade, when his grandfather began to teach him math at a faster pace. “He would go on walks with me and he would explain concepts to me,” he said. “I was quite lucky to have him because he taught me a lot of what I know.”

Russia. Turkey. California. Texas.