Nilava Metya

“PROMYS has helped me a lot in discovery of mathematics and build up number theory myself, with background support directing me at every step. Since the program is so intensive and so well structured, one actually feels the heavenly bliss of reasoning at every step. What seemed to be an obligation at first turned into a hobby later. This gave the feeling of a real mathematician - experimenting with numbers, conjecturing some beautiful lemmas and theorems, and proving some of them - just the way number theory had originally developed. PROMYS could stand as one of the few epitomes for education...

PROMYS actually prepares people for life, not just number theory. Science is the gem of understanding the current state of life. "Mathematics is the queen of all sciences, and number theory the queen of mathematics," says C. F. Gauss, and thus we ended up in discovering the gem of number theory. The philosophy behind conjecturing based on experimentation, and then providing crystal-clear reasoning for justification might help us understand mathematics, but is the most useful in sustaining life.”