Matthew K. Bunday (Learn in Freedom)

Hi. I wrote this Web page to introduce myself to other members of SET (the Julian A. Stanley Study of Exceptional Talent). I am also a Davidson Young Scholar. I was born in 1992 in Washington state. Now I live in Minnesota. I like math very much. It goes without saying that I also like computer games. But I don't spend all day in front of the computer; I like playing outside with people too.

I have two younger brothers and a younger sister. We all like to use the computer, play outside, draw, build Legos, and read. My parents like to read. My mom likes to play piano, and my dad likes to go to meetings of parents about education issues. We all like eating. We like Chinese food, for example fried rice with Spam, dried seaweed, beef stir-fried with green peppers, and potstickers. We speak Chinese at home some, although we need to build it up again after more than five years of living in the United States. We used to live in Taiwan, where my mom was born, and experienced the 1999 earthquake.

In the summer of 2004 I took two summer courses in modern mathematics in the first session at the Centre for Talented Youth Ireland in Dublin, Ireland and in probability and game theory in the second session JHU CTY summer program in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

At my summer course in Ireland, in the morning class our teacher would be there and he would lecture to us and teach us the new material. After the morning lecture, we would go to the computer lab. Then in the evening we would go back to the classroom and do homework which the teaching assistant gave us. Once in a while the teacher was there too in the evening. When I was there we learned a lot of differential calculus and that was mostly what we learned. We learned about finding tangent lines to curves, infinite limits, and velocity changes. We also learned a bunch of C programming. I think the computer programming class wasn't happy because we were in their lab more than they were. We liked doing lots of brain-teasers and near the end of class we had competitions to see who could come up with a brain-teaser nobody could solve.

In Ireland it was interesting to learn about the political views and culture over there. The main games they follow there are football (what Americans call soccer) and rugby. They seem to really dislike President Bush as do many people in Europe. It was obsessive how much the Irish kids liked soccer. Every evening I would gather with them in one of the lounges to watch soccer games. There were two times when we couldn't do this: once because there was a fire drill at 9:30pm in the middle of a thunderstorm. And once when we had to go to the summer program's talent show. (That was the final game of the European cup so the students were really angry; they were even thinking of getting a portable television to bring to the talent show.) When I was in Ireland I also learned about Blu-Tack, a blue blob they use instead of tape. It is really fun to mold and is better than Silly Putty. It was annoying how the Irish kids always corrected my pronunciation because they have their own way of pronouncing everything. The talent show was on the 4th of July and all the American kids had to go on stage and pronounce a list of words projected on a screen. Then all the Irish kids would laugh.

In Lancaster it was fun because in my class instead of grades you got fake money, with John Nash's picture on it. You could use the fake money to buy real things like chess sets, funny staff T-shirts ("I survived Lancaster 2004: no food, no water, no laundry"), baby pacifiers, and snacks in auctions at the middle and the end of the course. The course tradition is that the kids who buy baby pacifiers in the auction come to class sucking on them the next day. In this class we talked about noncooperative games the most, but we also talked a little about cooperative games.

The JHU-CTY summer program was more strict on the rules and had more rules than Ireland, but it was still fun. My biggest regret there is that it was a peanut-free program so I couldn't eat any real food like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. In Lancaster they wanted you to go to bed and not read at night, so they took flashlights away, but people usually brought two: one to hand in, and one to keep. I still read because there were yard lights out my window so I would read books at night. In Lancaster, everyone's obsessed with Frisbee and they play ultimate Frisbee instead of football. I still write to a lot of kids I met in the JHU-CTY program. At Lancaster I met interesting people like a 4' 6" person who can burp louder than people with microphones. He can also bend (so we called him Bendy Ben and Burpo the Magnificent). At both programs the food was not as enjoyable as my mom's home cooking. At Lancaster the food could have been better, but they were rebuilding the cafeteria when I was there. Sometimes I skipped breakfast and had a cup of ramen noodles and Pop Tarts instead.

The summer of 2005 I went to MathPath. I got to meet a lot of famous mathematicians like Paul Zeitz, Robin Hartshorne, and Alexander Soifer, plus two cool history of math teachers. I learned a lot of new problem-solving techniques and learned hyperbolic and projective geometry.

Mathpath in 2005 was in Colorado Springs, Colorado which is also where my uncle lived then. We went up on Pikes Peak, which is the tallest mountain in the area you can drive up. I played chess against the third-rated youth chess player in the United States and did math with some of the best math competitors in the country. My residential counselor was really nice and probably the most easy-going of the counselors. I was able to play soccer every evening at Mathpath, and the organizer of MathPath, Dr. Thomas, is really good even though he is really old. (I've been poking fun at him ever since he hit me in the head with a soccer ball.) I was one of the better players, which made me feel a little more confident about my soccer ability, so I tried out for traveling soccer when I got home. This school year I will be on a U-15 "classic 2" traveling soccer team. I've been able to keep in touch with the people I met at MathPath through a Google group.

I've been doing a lot of math competitions including the AMCs and MATHCOUNTS. I used to take part in a local junior high math league that was often very short on members. I'm now doing the state senior high math league; problems are much harder in that league. And I have qualified for the AIME three times now and hope to again this year and perhaps even qualify for the USAMO. For computer programming I've mostly been working on physics simulations and artificial intelligence/stupidity. I'm currently trying to develop RPGs using a story originally thought up for a book. I took part in the 2006 NaNoWriMo (and wrote 50,000 words)! My most time-consuming fall semester activity is novice Lincoln-Douglas debate for the debate team of Hopkins High School in Minnetonka.

I've always been homeschooled and I take a lot of distance learning courses. This year I am enrolled in the Military Academy for Aspiring Youths (otherwise known as EPGY Online High School). I'm taking a philosophy of government seminar, AP U.S. history, expository writing, AP Physics B, and C11C programming from OHS. I'm taking calculus C and linear algebra from the University of Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Program (UMTYMP).

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859)

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Minnetonka, MN 55345