2002 Kalin Award Winner
Mauro Braunstein
by Daniel Frederick, JP Taravella High School, FL

The title of 2002 Kalin Award winner was bestowed upon Mauro Braunstein of JP Taravella High School in Coral Springs, Florida, at the 2002 Mu Alpha Theta National Convention in Starkville, Mississippi. Mauro finished 11th in his class of approximately 670 with a GPA of about 5.0. He now attends Harvard College.

"And, in first place on the History of Math topic test, with a perfect score of 180, from JP Taravella High School, Mauro Braunstein." The entire JP Taravella delegation rises in thunderous applause, drowning out that of the rest of the stadium full of sponsors and mathletes. To them, this was just another first place trophy for him, but to Mauro, it was much more.

To Mauro, Mu Alpha Theta isn't just about competitions. It's about students challenging themselves to learn mathematical topics they either wouldn't normally cover in a regular classroom setting or at a faster pace than normal. Either way, he feels self-motivation to learn math is the most important thing a student can glean from the organization.

Mu Alpha Theta is dedicated to inspiring keen interest in mathematics, developing strong scholarship in the subject, and promoting the enjoyment of mathematics among high school and community college students, and these three things together mean that Mu Alpha Theta tries to instill a passion for mathematics; in the words of Jaime Escalante, "ganas." This passion, this ganas, entails truly loving math down to its barest bones, up to the point where something -- anything -- you don't know becomes a vacuum that needs to be filled. This tension, this resolution, the epiphany when two remote areas are found to be connected, thus adding another dimension to the already complicated vector space of mathematics, is true pleasure. In essence, Mu Alpha Theta's goal is to show this primal pleasure to as many people as possible.

To illustrate his opinion, Mauro offers an anecdote:

How does one develop the passion mentioned above? Ah, this is when competition and mathematics start feeding upon each other. It is when one competes because one loves mathematics instead of the other way around. This is the case with me. I took home practice (imagine that!) interschool tests, not because I wanted to practice for the interschool test at a competition but because I wanted to "prepare for Jeopardy." Jeopardy was a round at the 2000 National Convention offered to the top nine contestants in each of Alpha and Mu Ciphering, and I will tell you that my victory was not because of the practice interschool tests. I just used Jeopardy as an excuse to make me learn more mathematics. . . . That's keen interest right there; math took a big enough place in my heart that competition was nothing more than the ending sequence to a long-played videogame.

Mauro's achievements in Mu Alpha Theta during his high-school career reflect his beliefs. During his freshman year, he took a course in geometry and competed as a Euclidean member at the 1999 Florida state convention and at the Gatlinburg, Tennessee, national convention, but he took the Theta Individual tests. On those tests that year, Mauro took home 2nd place at the state convention and 7th at the national convention. The following year, he took a pre-calculus course and competed as an Alpha member. His junior year, he took Advanced Placement Calculus AB and learned the course material so quickly he was able to finish the material for Advanced Placement Calculus BC well before the AP exams rolled around. For his senior year, he nominally studied the BC course and independently studied multivariable calculus.

According to Penny Swant, head sponsor of Mu Alpha Theta at Taravella, one of Mauro's most remarkable qualities that made him stand out as a competitor in the eyes of the Kalin award committee was "how many hours of service he gave to not only Taravella students but students from many other high schools across the state. I thought his service to other students was phenomenal. It was an amazing amount of time. I also liked the self-motivation he had to teach himself subjects, his thirst for knowledge, and his insight into all problem-solving strategies."

In addition to volunteering his time to help students from other schools, as well as his own, learn math, Mauro also found time to make himself a highly skilled, yet humble, competitor. "He's definitely one of the top three students I've had the pleasure of working with in my thirty-four years of teaching," says Jim Meier, former Mu Alpha Theta head sponsor as Taravella, "but no one, in all my years of working with Mu Alpha Theta, has exemplified the true spirit of what it means to be in Mu Alpha Theta more than he has."

Although he participated in the same "math" competitions as the average Mu Alpha Theta competitor throughout his high school career, Mauro's idea of the concept of "mathematics" is markedly different from that of the average competitor. To Mauro, "Mathematics is the study not of numbers but of the relationships between relationships, and for that, it holds a unique place in all of knowledge as being something truly universal. . . . Ultimately, one needs to understand the infinite to understand all of mathematics. Infinity is a great chasm, stretching out in all directions in all dimensions in all spaces. Mu Alpha Theta brings students closer to the completely infinite chasm. It is up to the student to look on in wonder."