A story of a town

This was originally a diary entry, but I showed it to some students who told me I should put it in my blog instead.

Imagine you’ve moved to a new town, and want to explore the local offerings, because there’s a lot to do and see, and you’re expecting to live here a while.

The first few days, it’s really overwhelming. Everything is unfamiliar. You get lost just trying to buy groceries. You constantly have to consult maps to get anywhere. It takes a while to adjust.

But after the first week, you notice you don’t need a map as much. You can walk to the grocery store yourself; you remember which turn to take each crossing. You know the names of the biggest streets and a few landmarks, and you can get around with familiar roads as anchors. Though you’ve only been inside a small fraction of the buildings, you already have a sense of the city layout.

And perhaps most importantly, you find you already have an idea where to visit next. Like that quaint old-fashioned bookstore you pass by every morning on the way to coffee that you thought looked really neat, and you just know you have to come by some Sunday afternoon. Or the park with the fountain in it by the bus stop that’d be a great picnic location. Or the opera house you keep hearing about. You know these things instinctively because you’ve actually started walking the streets and seeing the store windows and feeling the air, things no paper map could have told you in advance.

… This is all a metaphor for why I feel so strange when people ask me for an ordered list of books for math olympiads. Yes, you might feel lost at the beginning, or need a lot of GPS assistance at first. But this town is smaller than you might think. Even if you’re new, it’s a mistake to worry about Google Maps vs Apple Maps¹, or whether to trust Yelp. Your priority is to get oriented enough that you can explore yourself.