Shapes
Circles, triangles, hexagons, and squircles. I have always been a lover of shapes. Some visually aesthetic, others mathematically complex, and all mentally intriguing. Like an apeirogon, my life is comprised of infinite sides — ranging from the culinary arts, robotics, dance, to editing film. Geometry has provided me a feeling of structure throughout my life, and I suppose I could say, it has kept me in shape.
As a visual learner, I grew up seeing objects as shapes. I recall staring at the construction workers who paved the entirety of my driveway with small bricks, in awe of the precision of their arcs. The young geometrically-enlightened me would run around the house with a piece of string and a calculator as big as my face, measuring every circular object and calculating whether or not the ratio of the circumference to the diameter was truly 3.1415.
Every Chinese New Year, my family would gather around a DIY hot pot made from a yin-yang pot and a camping stove. Preparing for the grand feast was not easy. We split up the work; my brother set up the stove, my mom made the broth, my dad prepared the meat, and I diced my life away. Each ingredient had to be perfectly chopped to be a nice bite size, but not so small it would disintegrate into the soup. We would tell stories and jokes while submerging cubes of taro and elliptical slices of lamb into the piping hot broth. Shapes had the power to unite my family and create connections to our homeland, despite being more than 6000 miles away.
When I first started robotics, the creation process seemed complex, confusing, and even magical. But as the years went by, I realized that building a robot consisted of nothing more than the experimental manipulation of shapes. Every week, my team would vandalize our whiteboards with messy drawings of chassis designs and intake systems. My knack for spatial thinking allowed me to envision potential flaws in our design. Cantilevered wheels slowly become slanted over time, causing the robot to move in curves rather than lines. Asymmetrical weight distributions and a high center of gravity would cause the robot to tip during deceleration. Together, we innovated in a small garage, eating home-baked cookies and microwaved quesadillas.
Through dance, I fell in love with not only seeing shapes, but creating my own shapes. A rond-de-jambe felt like gliding across graph paper with a protractor. A sauté made my legs look like an isosceles triangle. Each line segment or arc that flowed through my body had a meaningful purpose; it all had to come together to produce a cohesive set of movements. In dance competitions, in order for my team to reach ultimate synchronization, we broke down each dance into individual counts. In my mind, I memorized every piece of choreography as a sequence of shapes. When I dance, I am drawing a masterpiece with my body.
When creating short promotional videos as an ASB Tech Representative at school, I discovered that there was also a geometric component to editing film. Each clip was a little rectangle of time, which I moved around to match the longitudinal waves of the soundtrack below. I could see the impact these permutations of shapes made within my community. The videos were more engaging than flyers, and attendance at school events increased.
Biomedical engineering captivates me, as it combines the set-in-stone rules of geometry with the artistic and creative side of innovation. I want to push the frontiers of cutting edge medicine while simultaneously feeding my passion for polygons.
The world is made of shapes, and shapes can change the world. My life would be, as one could say, pointless, if I could not utilize my love for lines and figures to make this green and blue sphere we call home a better place.