By Nate Fisher

If you wanted to simplify the number of personalities in the world, you could say there are two kinds of people: those that would choose the superpower of flight and those that would choose the power to become invisible at will. Eighth grader Karissa Fitzgerald has no interest in invisible things, let alone becoming invisible herself. She’s all about flight and would use that power to take off in search of a designated island: “Nobody’s gonna be there, and I’m gonna explore it. I’d like to see what land would look like without human beings…No cities, no roads, no buildings. I bet the water would look different there.”

Karissa not only dreams of a supernatural ability to fly; she’s also fascinated by the fundamental thing that allows us to launch our machines of exploration into the atmosphere — mathematics. She’s excited about high school, if only for the math. When asked what she enjoys about math, she says, “I just always liked it. I like to learn new stuff about it. Maybe it’s the numbers. I like to add them.” She explains she finds joy in reaching more expansive numbers, and the only way to get there is to add variables until you reach that point.

“If you’re good with math, you get into business,” she clarifies. The outcome she’s currently calculating toward is a career in business, perhaps starting at Shawnee Community College. She indicates that the stronger one’s math skills, the more opportunities one may have in the job market.

She applies her analytical mind to art when she’s not lost in numbers, especially painting and drawing. She describes her art as abstract, or “not really realistic, but some of it is.” Whether it represents a tangible thing or not, her art is built on the underlying laws of mathematics. Abstraction is how concepts develop when separated from real-world phenomena; Math rarely relies on “the real” to solve its mysteries.

When NASA was trying to figure out an exploration flight of their own, not unlike Karissa’s imaginary trip to an abandoned island, they relied on the mathematical wizardry of Katherine Johnson. On May 5, 1961, she made the crucial trajectory calculations for Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight, in which he became the first American to reach space. It’s necessary to remember that, at the time, Johnson completed these calculations without computer assistance. When it came down to it, the rocket engines may have lifted the spaceflights and lunar mission craft, but Johnson’s math kept them in the air and eventually allowed them to land on the moon. There, the astronauts found no cities, no roads, and no buildings, which sounds like a place Karissa wouldn’t mind exploring.

Wherever Karissa’s knack for math takes her, the inspiration she takes from the hard work and persistence of her mother and grandmother factors into her flight path. In our experience, role models make for the best co-pilots. I hope she, and by extension, all those reading, remember that it’s not always a solo flight; sometimes, you need somebody there to crunch the numbers.