17-year old vocational high school student Jiang Ping, who spends her days studying fashion design and literally making clothes, places 12th out of 801 finalists for the global Alibaba Math Contest. Unlike most of the other contestants, who hail from the top educational institutions in the world — plenty from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and of course Tsinghua and Peking University — she was one of the roughly 50% of kids in China who didn’t even go to a regular high school and ended up at this vocational high school, where the primary purpose is to prepare them for a skilled, hands-on vocation. In her case, that is fashion design.
She seems to have had just a super high aptitude for Math since she was young, and always found all the math problems in class very trivial. When she aced her first math exam at the vocational school, her Math teacher gave her a few advanced math books for self study. Armed with just a Chinese-English dictionary and translation app, she began to study in her spare time and found a lot of joy in exploring the beautiful universe that is Math.