Our world is at the mercy of math. At least that’s what I used to believe. Paycheck to paycheck. Grab the smallest fruits and lightest packs of meat, it’s charged per pound. Rent is due at the beginning of the month. Don’t forget to tip at least 18%. Hurry, we’ll be there in half an hour. And how many more miles until we have to fill up gas again? But going a level deeper in the math can soften the grip of the cuffs. A high yield savings account can give you back more interest than you’d lose paying your debt off immediately. And if you listen closely, you’ll hear her (math’s) light steps amongst our streets. The beat of your favorite song. The tempo change that feels right because it’s spaced out in a way that hugs your ears. “Five, six, seven, eight” says the dance instructor at the park. And if you choose to study her a little further, you’ll notice the vectors that have been dancing in those graphic tee designs you love. You’ll see how researchers found the perfect pockets of time for each concept you want to store in long term memory. And in studying how we learn, we’ve taught math to think for herself with programs that attempt to model our own brains. This is where my path has led me, going into my senior year of a major that combines computer science, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with a concentration in learning. Now, rather than at her mercy, I’d say math has become our most valuable teammate. I love math because she’s allowed me to feel more deeply, see more clearly, think more critically, plan more accurately and live more freely.

Six weeks after surgery, today was Rubina's first day back at the school. During her recovery, she spent most of her time indoors. Now that she had to go teach, she had to relearn the rhythm of the external world. She crossed the street quickly, unsure when it was truly a red hand or a walking icon and always stepped too hard on the last step of the stairs because she thought there were more left. The implant behind her eyes had been built for someone else's world, not for her type of glaucoma. Rubina's implant ran on a fixed stimulation rate, calibrated to the clinical trial average but her glaucoma damaged her optic nerve unevenly, slowing the nerve conduction velocity in the fibers that still transmit signals. Her chip fired pulses faster than her damaged nerve could actually carry them to the brain, which created a delay that made her walk through her own life like a woman arriving late to every room she had already entered. Unfortunately, on her way to work was the intersection of an accident that occurred earlier that year. Her late husband, Zeal, and her were heading to their favorite restaurant to celebrate their 20th anniversary when suddenly a car came from the right, running a red light, and hitting them straight on. Sadly, Zeal and the other driver, who was a mom simply trying to tend to her son’s sharp pain, passed away, but fortunately the son survived. She felt less lonely in the classroom with her eager middle schoolers so she returned right when her recovery period ended. Too focused on doing her best to teach algebra while managing her delay, she had not yet noticed her students were facing a similar struggle. Allan had recently gotten a secondhand reading device run on a generic phoneme-timing model as an attempt to minimize the impact of dyslexia on his grades but the letters kept skipping and doubling before his mind could catch them. Lacey's hearing aid held a fixed two-second buffer, built for a mind that lost a word at a time, not one that lost the sentence whole. The anniversary of Zeal’s passing came a few months after. After a long call with Zeal’s mom, she decided to set foot in his lab for the first time after the accident. Her eyes immediately watered, and she began sobbing uncontrollably, like that night a year ago, when she realized what he had been working on in secret all along. Zeal and Rubina were incredible engineers, with the first found a passion for research and the second for teaching. She thought the lab was full of him. Messy sketches of prototypes pinned beside grocery lists and random to do notes next to his newest publication draft that just a week after got approved. Zeal used to say she had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, and that she moved through a room like music that never fell out of time. He spent the better part of a decade trying to give both of those things back to her, because he knew the generic market solutions would not treat her case appropriately. Set on finishing what he started, she would teach during the day and engineer all night at the lab, working from his notes as if he were still in the room. A few months after, she went in for another usual building session and fell asleep in the lab. The next morning, she woke up from her alarm and started getting ready for class. Sleep deprived enough, she dropped her coffee mug. The glass covered the kitchen floor, right when she heard it hit the ground… right when she heard it hit the ground. She synced the delay! At least enough. She began making all sorts of noises throughout the house searching unsuccessfully for proof that she had not completed her late husband’s research. She rushed to her class, carefully, as she was readjusting back this time. Once in class, she saw how her dear students were struggling with their own devices, that were not made with them in mind, but another deviated average. Seizing the opportunity, her ambitious mind and kind heart led her to lay methodologies that would allow each student to make their improvement truly their own. So she did, finding, one at a time, the specific rhythm of each child the world's machines had never bothered to learn. Allan's reading device now watched his eyes instead of the page, tracking the exact pause where his gaze caught on a word, the bounce backward when he needed to read it twice, and let the sound wait for him instead of asking him to catch up to it. Lacey's ears learned to listen to her own attention by reading the faint electrical static behind her focus, and held onto sound a little longer exactly when her mind needed the extra breath. Their school gained popularity from the quick increase in scores. Along with many other students, a boy with old, ill-fitting equipment and a diagnosis she recognized instantly, because she had spent a decade of someone else's love letters learning its exact shape, transferred to their school. She adjusted Zeal’s original plans to his measurements and gifted him what Zeal tried to gift her. As the little boy was joyfully heading home with his new vision, he walked past the intersection, where he lost his mom years prior as she was desperately trying to get him to the hospital. In a world that kept building machines to make us all match the same average, Rubina engineered the opposite, not sameness, but fit. Her students went to top universities and pursued a variety of careers, each on their own paths with confidence, because Rubina’s courage and kindness had shown them their differences were not something to fix, but something worth building for.