ENCINITAS — San Dieguito Academy senior Lennon Wielechowski delights in applying solutions or logic from one domain to another.
The 18-year-old Cardiff-by-the-Sea resident keeps approaches and ideas in his back pocket, waiting for the opportunity to try them in new settings or to solve new problems.
“I like systems,” Wielechowski said. “I love modular origami, even though it is a little boring to do after a while. The way people are able to create scenes and especially moving things out of paper is what I really appreciate. Anything where there’s rules, but only a few of them, and it’s really open-ended.”
Wielechowski is currently in his final year at San Dieguito Academy, where he runs cross country. He is also co-president of the school’s Pickleball Club and Dungeons & Dragons Club, where he takes pride in organizing games as a dungeon master.
“Without the structure of the player’s handbook, it’s kind of just whatever you say goes,” Wielechowski said. “The rulebook allows people to trust in the game itself and not just the person telling the story.”
He was also selected as one of the winners of the 2025 Desmos Math Art Contest for his interactive graph, “Bear in the Woods.”
More than 10,000 artists from 100 countries entered the contest this year, according to a Desmos spokesperson. This year’s honor in the Desmos contest marks his third consecutive win in his age group.
Desmos is an online graphing calculator that can model and depict a wide array of mathematical formulas. The free program has also been incorporated into several standardized tests since it launched in 2011.
“If Desmos is your hobby, that makes the SAT a lot easier than it otherwise would be,” Wielechowski said.
Not only has Desmos become a hobby, but Wielechowski also helps beta test new features for the calculator.
Wielechowski said that for his “Bear in the Woods” project, he wanted to demonstrate an innovative approach. He revisited a bear animation he built for the competition before his winning streak began, adding several twists.
This time, his project incorporated pseudorandomness — “computers can’t actually simulate real randomness,” he said — to depict a mama bear walking through a forest that is always generating new trees and mountains in the distance. The piece is interactive, allowing users to change the perspective and climb trees in a program, again designed by math.
Wielechowski also said his use of point visuals — specifically how they sped up processing to maintain a believable pace for the lumbering bear and its cub, which follows under its own logic mimicking childlike curiosity — contributed to the win.
“Because it has to check every pixel for whether it satisfies the inequality or not, I realized one of the fastest things it does in those renders is singular points,” he said.
Wielechowski said he was inspired to approach the project this way by the Pointillism art movement, referencing Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” as an influence.
He said his passion for the Math Art Contest stems from the way it combines two of his interests.
“I just love how math is abstract until it’s not. And then it becomes very, very practical and very useful,” Wielechowski said. “And that’s what I love about this. It gives practicality while keeping, like, the beauty and the theoretical aspects of math. Real world, there’s abstraction, there’s approximation. So, Desmos keeps precision while also letting you create stuff with it.
“And then the second thing that drew me to this competition was pushing the limits of a calculator. If there’s a system, and there’s not really been a lot done with it, and it has the capacity to create something cool, then I like to work with it.”
He credited Julie Bassler, his math teacher at Oak Crest Middle School, with planting the seed that blossomed into an award-winning, pseudorandom forest of mathematical trees.
“If she hadn’t assigned that one extra credit assignment of having us create whatever visual design we wanted, I never would have thought to mess around with it,” Wielechowski said. “I’m super grateful to her for introducing me to that because without Desmos, I wouldn’t have gotten into math so much.”
