dark room

university of nairobi proprietery mathematician training

In July 2016 I represented Kenya competing in the 2016 International Math Olympiad.

The previous two months were full of intense daily study sessions, led by Dr.James Katende from the University of Nairobi. Dr.Katende stretched our young minds to the maximum, giving us a crash course in linear algebra, trilinear coordinates, and combinatorics.

This was the first year that Kenya was invited to compete in the IMO and we were the inaugural team. Whereas other countries' teams had been preparing for years in structured math camps and multiple tiers of examinations to select the cream of the crop, we felt much more like a rag-tag team of underdogs. Most of us had only learned about the IMO that year, and had been preparing for it for months at most.

Our classroom had the hallmarks of a classic university math lecture room, a chalkboard, desks, and little else. I really liked the low-tech environment of these study sessions; it felt like a continuation of how math had been studied for millinea in the past. The material was hefty, far beyond the scope we could understand, and some of the problems were totally incomprehensible, burning out our attention spans. I'm not sure if it was to motivate us or to intimidate us, but Dr.Katende repeatedly told us an anecdote that to this day has stuck with me.

He told us of the dark room, a room in the University of Nairobi that the mathematicians comandeered from the Physics department. In this room there is a desk, a chair, and a bowl full of coffee beans. Otherwise the room is devoid of any other niceties, including light and outside sound.

Dr.Katende explained that when a student is stuck on a difficult problem, they enter the room, and they do not come out until they have had a revelation in the problem. Just sitting in the dark - hallucinating - microdosing themselves on a continuous stream of potent Kenyan coffee beans.

I never had the terror/pleasure of working in one of these dark rooms, but the image has stuck with me. It is simulatensouly mystical and methodical, and a testament to the immense power of the mind. I think this method can help with all sorts of problems: emotional, psychic, creative, etc. At times math problems can feel like all of the above.

Two days before the competition, our team was in Hong Kong, and my teammates and I were crammed into my small dorm room staying up late solving past IMO problems. At some point I fell asleep, and I had vivid dreams where I was still working on the problem. In my dream state, I arrived at new techniques that I had not cosidered while awake, and the problem felt much more tangible. I was able to feel the multi-dimensional problem unfold around me, whereas awake I had trouble even simplifying the problem to understand it. I awoke and remembered one idea I had that took me down the correct path to an eventual solution.

I've had few experiences similar to this since, but occasionally can come up with solutions to problems stumping me over a dream. It is my internal dark room, a place where my mind can go every night to try to tackle and grasps the problems that are top of mind. I am not sure if I will be able to harness the power of the dream dark room more, but it gives me a sense of comfort knowing each day my mind retreats to a place of no distractions, where it is allowed to dream and think and grow in its own world, independent of time or space.