Solomon Maina

Mathematics

Ithaca, NY

What do you value about your liberal arts education?

The value of freedom to explore intellectual (and indeed other) interests cannot be understated. I certainly would be a much different person (probably in a bad way) had I not taken the courses in the humanities and social sciences that I got to take while I was a student at Cornell.

What, if any, research projects did you participate in at Cornell?

I worked with Professor Robert Constable in the computer science department over the summer of 2015, trying to find new representations of computable real numbers. This was rather difficult, but of course the existing literature was amazing!

Who or what influenced your Cornell education the most? How or why?

I gravitated towards courses with the most potential for novelty; if the material in a course is familiar, then there's not much point taking it, is there?