(Kaieteur News) – On Monday morning, a girl from Bartica sealed a guess inside an envelope. She had been shown a question no one had taught her to answer, how many of the numbers from 1 to 2,026 share no common factor with 2,026? and asked to commit, in writing, before any instruction, to what she believed. On Friday morning, at the Centre for Local Business Development on South Road, that envelope was opened. The girl who opened it was not quite the girl who sealed it. In between lay five days — and, in a sense, ten years.

This past Friday, July 31st, the summer mathematics programme founded in Georgetown in 2016 as the Queen’s College Summer Mathematics Institute closed its tenth-anniversary edition and opened its second decade under a new name: the Blackman-Waddell Summer Math Institute, under the auspices of STEM Guyana. Seventeen certificates were presented. The students who earned them came from sixteen schools, including Queen’s College and Saint Stanislaus, but also Bladen Hall Multilateral, North Georgetown Secondary, Mae’s, St. Joseph High, St. Rose’s High, Austin Castello Tutorial, and Chase’s Academic Foundation, from Georgetown to Berbice to Bartica. Some arrived with A’s in mathematics. Some came to strengthen a foundation. By Friday, those starting distinctions no longer defined the room and that was the point.

The programme rests on a conviction I have carried for a long time: mathematical talent exists in every community; opportunity does not. I learned it in Central Brooklyn, where the Frank Ragland Math Masters Institute at Medgar Evers College, a mathematics circle in the great Eastern European tradition, proved it year after year with children whose mathematical potential the system had too often underestimated. Eleven years ago, on July 31st, 2015, we held that institute’s closing ceremony in New York. One year later, on July 31st, 2016, we closed our first camp on home soil in Georgetown. This past Friday, the date kept faith with us a third time. Some dates, it turns out, are loyal.