A journey and a half through STEM

Hi! As it is Pi day, as a lover of all things maths, I thought it would only be appropriate if I wrote a little something for this rather special irrational day! See now being half Greek, for a long time Pi was just another letter than I had to know to say pretty much anything in Greek and then I turned 13. I walked into my Maths classroom and there it was, rather out of place on the interactive whiteboard and being the little miss 'genius' that I thought it was, put my hand up and shouted "that's Pi!" (Pronouncing it Pee) and well I got a fair few puzzled looks followed by a good minute's worth of laughter. Moral of the story- learn how to pronounce things in English before you, like me end up shouting stupid things in class. See, like those surds that I know many of you despise, Pi is also an irrational number so I just wanted to thank π for existing as it has saved my hands from having to write out 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105 ...

Hi! My name is Vanessa and I love maths. In fact I would go one step further to say that I adore it, and sometimes it can be very difficult to explain why to people, as no one seems to get it. I love it with a passion to the point where words can't even explain why I love it so much- but numbers can. So, let's say we start with a very grizzly looking proof: i.e: Fermat's last theorem, for example. Now think about this, Andrew Wiles sat there for 7 years of his life trying to make sense of and to eventually solve this theorem- 7 years! Now, the part in all this that I love is this- that moment when that awful looking proof falls into place; that moment where everything begins to make sense; that moment when all that time you spent sitting down, staring at a piece of paper with an array of numbers and letters scattered on it becomes worth it- that beautiful moment right there is what I love about maths. But it isn't just on the piece of paper, its all around us-...