Smarty Pants

If you ask Sarah Moss about her reputation as “the girl behind the column” in her freshman face book, be prepared for a lengthy explanation. For final clarification, she did not choose that photo of herself. “Oh my God. I was sooo mad my mom sent that face book picture in! It was the most ridiculous thing.” The Greek column was a prop used in her senior portrait. The photo was left over because she didn’t want to give it out to anybody.

In retrospect, the Greek theme to her first photo at Harvard is fitting. A Leverett house senior who hails from Normal, Ill., Sarah is a math concentrator. She sees Greek letters all the time in her mathematical studies, and spent last summer learning Ancient Greek at Harvard Summer School. When first learning Greek, “knowing math gives you a slight edge,” she says, “because you already know how to write phi.”

Sarah has studied Mathematics in a variety of places, including in Hungary during the fall of her junior year. While there, she happened to pick up some Hungarian on the side. She also spent a summer at Duluth, a tiny city on Lake Superior. For ten straight weeks, every day for Sarah consisted of intense research with a small team of mathematicians. Unfortunately, she failed to come up with a yes or no answer to the problem she was attempting to solve, a question in graph theory. So, she asked the most trustworthy source of information: her 8-ball. “I still don’t know the answer,” she says resignedly.

On the Harvard campus, Sarah is an active member of Math club. She describes the club as “A disorganized group of a few people who organize things for math concentrators.” The most celebrated math club event has been the pie eating competition. Last March 14, (3.14, otherwise known as “pi day”), Sarah organized a gigantic pie eating competition among faculty and students. She obtained around 35 pies and, at 3:14 in the afternoon, the competitors ate as much pie as possible for 3 minutes and 14 seconds. Sarah also plays the violin in HRO and is involved in ECHO.

Although she has focused on math as an undergraduate, Sarah’s true passion lies in philosophy; mainly moral philosophy. She took the class Justice, and was amazed by the late night conversations she had with roommates. She identifies strongly with the ideas of Kant. This semester she’s taking a seminar on his political and religious philosophy taught by professor Christine Kosgaard. “She is my hero. All my roommates learned about Kant too this semester.” Next year Sarah will continue her studies in philosophy across the Atlantic at an Oxford master’s program.