Tiwalayo Aina has dreamed of attending Richard Feynman’s alma mater since he was 8 years old. This fall he will travel to Cambridge, Mass. to follow in the footsteps of the famous physicist and walk the hallowed halls of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“I’m really excited,” Aina said. “My parents are elated. It is hard to believe that I will be there. When I visited the campus, I met a student who will be in my class, and he was a math and physics Olympiad medalist. There are crazy smart people going to MIT,” said Aina who is planning to earn degrees in mathematics and computer science.
After graduating from high school, Aina came to Collin College to take math classes including statistics, calculus III, linear algebra and discrete mathematics. He also took advantage of the college’s Center for the Advanced Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences (CASMNS) program and completed an undergraduate research project to explore deeper questions that went beyond his math courses’ curriculum. While his research project, “Exploration of Unique Distributions of Colored Balls into Boxes,” may sound simple, the mathematical theory is quite complex.
Aina explains that one application of his CASMNS project is in the field of encryption.
“Encryption is based on the idea that it is hard to factor large numbers,” Aina said. “If you wanted to know how long it would take you to factor a number in a certain way, you could give an estimate of how long it would take to crack an encryption scheme because you would know how many factorizations to check.”
Initially, Aina devised a strategy for his undergraduate research that became a dead end. He learned that often researchers have to start all over again with new concepts. Thankfully, the math classes he took at the college served as a functional foundation which he could tap into to formulate ideas to make his formula work. With some encouragement from his CASMNS professor Bill Ardis, he had a viable new strategy a month later.
“This is what we call blue skies research,” Aina said. “You have to check your work and make sure it doesn’t contain any assumptions. Professor Ardis offered a bunch of different ideas and strategies to explore and moral support because I was excited and confident about the first idea. He explained that I shouldn’t be disheartened by dead ends because those are part of the job description.”
Aina is trying to decide whether he wants to become a researcher in academia or work with quantitative finance in industry. Regardless of his decision, mathematics will play a large role in his future just as it has in his childhood.
Numbers have always fascinated Aina, much to his two younger sisters’ frustration. His mother tried to settle disputes by picking a number in her head and asking her children to guess the result. It wasn’t long before Aina was winning every time.
“Many people will pick their favorite number, and most people want to go first. Over time I realized that you don’t want to go first because you can maximize your probability of being right. For instance, if the numbers are between 1 and 100 and someone picks 80, you should choose 79, so that the only time the other person will win is when the number is 80 or greater, which only happens about 21 percent of the time. My family had to resort to a different way of settling disputes, like rock, paper, scissors. Eventually that is not going to be safe either,” he said, laughing.
For more information about CASMNS, visit https://www.collin.edu/academics/casmns/.