Each week, the Record (using a script in R) randomly selects a student at the College for our One in Two Thousand feature, excluding current Record board members. This week, Isa Chou ’28 discussed his love for mathematics, growing up in New Mexico, and the mathematical concept of p-adics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dilay Kalınoğlu (DK): You’re a prospective mathematics major. Why math?
Isa Chou (IC): I’ve loved [math] for a really long time. When I was little it was a new challenge, and doing math is like doing art for me. You get to make the rules yourself, you get to set up the system yourself. Every art has its own medium, and then it has its limitations with that medium, but you can literally just do whatever you want with math. It’s hard to describe why I love math because I’ve been with it for so long. When I don’t do math, I don’t feel good.
DK: That’s a good reason to do something. It was Halloween this past weekend. Do you have any Halloween traditions?
IC: Halloween is not a big deal for me. It’s my sister’s favorite holiday, so I should [have traditions], but I don’t. She’s like, “I love Halloween,” but I love Christmas.
DK: You’re from New Mexico. Can you tell me more about growing up there?
IC: I moved to New Mexico when I was six, after spending some time in Chicago. New Mexico is really beautiful. It’s almost distinct from the rest of the United States, and its population is mostly Latino. We have our own cuisine that’s distinct from Mexican cuisine. We have a large Native population, and the climate’s really different. When I moved here, I was vaguely surprised by how different the rest of the United States was. I’m half Mexican. I didn’t really see myself as Mexican before [coming to Williams], because everybody around me was also some degree of Latino. And now I’m realizing all these mannerisms that I have from home that no one shares here.
DK: What do you miss the most from home?
IC: I really miss the food from New Mexico, obviously. This is not really a New Mexican food, but I really like pozole. It’s red chili and big corn hominy with some slices of pork. It’s really good. I miss the food there a lot because I used to cook all the time, every night, and here, it’s pretty impossible.
DK: What’s your favorite place on campus?
IC: Whenever I’m feeling really stressed with everything, and all these buildings are becoming an unfriendly place, I like to go on a really long walk. If you go past Cole Field, and you go down Water Street, and you go to Cole Avenue, you can find the Mohican Trail. You can just keep going through the forest and through some fields. I’ve actually never been there in the daytime. I’m always doing this at, like, 4 a.m. The nature here is so beautiful that it’s just nice to be back outdoors.
DK: How was the transition from New Mexico to here?
IC: I love the cold.
DK: That’s a hot take. [Laughs]
IC: Yeah. [Laughs] My mom was like, “Are you going to die up here with, like, no coat?” But I really like not dying of heat, so it’s good. As a freshman, when I found somebody else from Albuquerque, [N.M.], we ran and we hugged each other. Really, the culture shock is not that big — it’s just that I was expecting there not to be any.
DK: Tell me about your current obsessions.
IC: In math, there’s something called the p-adic. You can redefine the distance between two points to be however you want. And I think that’s the coolest thing in the world just to create a whole new world of numbers because after you do this distance, then you can fill it in. I think the p-adics are my favorite thing in the world. They’re awesome. When I came here, I was like, “I’m gonna do so much humanities. I want to study politics.” I do want to study politics. But I was like, “I can’t.”
DK: That brings me to my next question. What’s your favorite class you have taken at the College?
IC: My first semester, I took the tutorial on refugees in international policy [with Professor of Political Science Emerita Cheryl Shanks]. She just retired, but she’s so good. It was really hard, but I think that just from this class, my worldview has changed a lot, because I wasn’t aware of the way that individuals are viewed by foreign policy. That class is the reason that I was like, “I really need to check my worldview and also see what else the world is doing because this is really insane.”
DK: What did you do this summer?
IC: I went to a [Research Experience for Undergraduates] at the Centro de Investigacíon en Matemáticas in Guanajuato, Mexico. There were 10 Mexican students, 10 American students. It was really eye-opening to me every day. We’d wake up at 9 a.m., and we’d do math all day until 5 p.m. There was such a vibrant queer culture there that I wasn’t expecting. It was so nice to just be able to be out in the city, and to be in a place dedicated to math is really beautiful. I was also really happy I got to cook again.
DK: You mentioned you’re the president of a mathematics club.
IC: When I came to Williams, there was no math-related book club. So, I wanted to start one. In math, there’s a lot of these obscure topics that will never ever be covered by a Williams class, and this, for me, provides some motivation for actually reading these things, because I want to, I just never get around to it. And for other people, I hope it provides some sort of community. During this semester, one of my good friends, whom I met through the math club, approached me and wanted to help me run it. At Williams, I think math can become a schoolwork thing, or a career thing, which is even worse. And in this, it’s one of the times where we can just talk about it and not have any of these strange associations. So it’s like a stress-free time for each action we enjoy talking about.
DK: You mentioned that you’re trans. What is the trans community like here?
IC: I came here specifically because I wanted to come out. New Mexico is a blue state, but they’re very not queer, and there’s a very well-established norm. For one, not only is health care really difficult to get, I wanted to be in a really accepting space where a bunch of people are really openly weird and comfortable with being different from other people and standing out that way. I thought I was nonbinary for the longest time, but my community of friends really supported me through it, and two weeks ago, I started hormone therapy. I became close to one of my best friends on this campus because I was the first person she came out to. Then, immediately I was like, “All right, we’re dressing you up in girl clothes.” I think that the Williams community as a whole is really so much more supportive than anywhere I have ever been. And for that, I really appreciate it.
