AP Statistics

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres,” Pythagoras delicately sums up the beauty of mathematics. To me, math is not a subject, but it is a journey that I have embarked on since the day I was born. And AP Statistics happens to be a milestone on my way to achieving an understanding of the world.

AP Statistics taught me how to develop and use two of the most important skills in today’s society: data analysis and mathematical reasoning. Looking around, I become aware of the significant amount of data that human beings receive every day. Information exists everywhere: in newspapers, on social media, or during our quick catch-up with one of our friends we have not seen for a long time. The diverse and abundant input we take in can easily undermine the strongest part of our body - the brain. Therefore, without the ability to decipher or differentiate between what information is useful and what is not, we can easily get lost and let ourselves be misled in the sea of propaganda. Possessing sharp mathematical reasoning, I strive to carefully analyze every piece of news to determine whether it delivers unbiased and correct information.

I often wonder how such huge and tragic events like plane crashes can be summed up into a one-page graph. Then, advancing from topic to topic, I realize many objects, actions, human achievement can be broken down to the basis of mathematics. Skyscrapers all start from a small blueprint on which were populated with numbers, symbols, and equations. The powerful social media that billions of people are using today are constructed by trillion lines of binary codes. The complicated Morse Code that has won countries' wars derives its sequence of dashes and dots from the logic of math. By mastering the analytical skills, I can understand and communicate with the world around beyond the limit of languages.

Through AP Statistics, I shifted the way I view the world around to a more mathematical and reasonable lens. As Mr. Brudzinski - my teacher for AP Statistics - always told me that every data has a story behind, I will be the one to uncover it.