#MyFreedomDay Student Speech

Friends, teachers and staff, good morning!

It’s been a while since I’ve stood on this stage to share my thoughts with you, and I honestly miss all the excitement that comes with preparing a talk and delivering it. I believe, and I hope you do too, that this day deserves to be spoken about and remembered in many more ways than one. Today is Pi day. Today is My Freedom Day. Today, Professor Stephen Hawking passed away.

Think about it. Today, we celebrate our right of freedom; our right to be us. Today, we also celebrate this mathematical victory we call Pi; this strange irrational constant that continues to appear in countless professional fields, and in nature itself. Yet today, an icon and inspiration to many of us who like to look up to the night sky, our world’s most renowned physicist, has passed away. Aren’t those three related? Don’t they join together beautifully on this single day to express the power of freedom, and of the mind? Maybe. But I believe they express something much mightier than that: the power of the free mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Hawking as we know him was a man trapped alive in his own body, hooked to some computer that was his only connection with the world around him. But his mind. His mind was freer than ours has ever been. His mind took him on wild journeys around the entire universe, and into black holes that are several trillion kilometers away from us. Such journeys gave him ideas that were never once thought of, and these very ideas, dressed in some fancy mathematical equations, described our universe in detail never before achieved. Do we now know how this world renowned physicist became so? In fact, can we understand how any of the discoverers in history rose to fame? They all started from nothing but a free mind.

So yes, while we celebrate My Freedom Day, remember that the idea of pi started from a free mind that ventured a bit too far from the norm, creating one of the most fundamental constants known. Remember that Professor Hawking, this name that has become the symbol of cosmology, started from a free mind. Today is My Freedom Day, and while we thankfully live with free bodies, we must remember to free our minds.

Thank you.