Article continues below advertisementYoumna M. Chamieh did not set out to become a writer. As a child, her primary passion was mathematics. "I loved how problems collapsed into order," she recalls. "I imagined myself becoming a theorist-making elegant proofs in chalk on a blackboard, preferably in the basement of a university where someone would 'discover' me next to a half-solved theorem and a mop." One of her early math teachers used to speak reverently about "elegant solutions"-proofs that revealed not only the logic but the beauty behind a problem.