Most eighth grade math students take pre-algebra or algebra. In their eighth grade year of math, Max and Stella Schindler found themselves surrounded not by fellow middle school students, but by high school seniors at Ladue Horton Watkins High School. The siblings spent their last year of middle school in Calculus BC, a class that many high school students never take.

When many children were still learning how to count, Max, 16, and Stella, 15, studied math concepts well above their age level. The siblings began learning math through the Kumon Math Program in pre-school, an especially young age, at the wishes of their parents.

“Our parents never had a great math education, so that was one thing that was really important to them,” Stella said. “My mom [who converted to Judaism] went to a Catholic girls’ school where math wasn’t prized as much as English.”

However, the Schindlers’ mathematical achievements could never have taken place without hours of study. Although Max and Stella have studied high-level math for years, upper-level math problems still present a challenge that may take hours or even days to complete.

“Sometimes I’ll do a problem and then I’ll look at it and I’ll just come back a few days later and I’ll try to work on it again. I’ll solve it at some point, but there’s no good way to learn it because if Max comes over and he tells me the answer is 42, then that takes away the whole learning how to solve it,” Stella said. “Why a problem works and how you figure out how to solve it is more important than (the right answer).”

Although math has not always been a favorite subject, Max is thankful for his persistence. He views his success as the result of years of studying complex math concepts and continuing to put in effort despite moments of disillusionment.

“It’s taken my entire life [to get to where I am today],” Max said. “There have been times when I’ve not liked doing it as much as I probably should have liked doing it, but I still trenched through, and now I’m at the point where I really appreciate math.”

The Schindlers’ appreciation of math sets them apart from many high school students who find the subject boring and difficult. Yet Max and Stella find math not only an intellectually stimulating and fascinating subject, but beautiful in its own way.

“Math is a really beautiful subject,” Max said. “People don’t appreciate its beauty enough because everyone does math in school … and it just becomes a whole thing of memorization, and you’re taught the steps you need to take to solve a problem but you’re never really given the intuition behind what those steps really mean. … That is really probably the most beautiful part of math: the motivation behind everything you do.”

The siblings haven’t only succeeded in school math classes among far older peers. In fact, the two have seen remarkable success in math competitions. In 2009, Max placed third in the national Math Counts competition, while Ladue Middle School’s team, which Stella and Max were both a part of, placed second. Max, Stella, and their teammates performed so well that they were invited to the White House, where they met President Barack Obama and the Apollo 11 astronauts. However, the math problems in competitions often differ from math seen in school curricula.

“In school math, you’re applying a technique you’ve been taught how to do, and you know exactly what comes next,” Max said. “The difficulty lies in cranking out the arithmetic or remembering what comes next. In competition math, it’s just general math problem solving. It’s unexplored terrain.”

Unfortunately, the siblings say that teachers often focus more on rote memorization than on the thought process of reaching an answer. Were schools to expose students to the underlying concepts of mathematics rather than mere techniques, the Schindlers believe that students would find math far more engaging.

“I think people would appreciate math a lot more if they got to see the other side, the exciting, interesting, side,” Stella said.

“A lot of people can’t memorize information if it’s force-fed to them, but when you actually spend some time on your own outside of school doing math for your own pleasure . . . it’s all of a sudden really easy to remember,” Max added. “You find yourself genuinely enjoying doing problems, which I think is the side of math almost no one sees.”