In pursuing both of her passions, music and mathematics, Zoey Guo values the invisible, the impossible, the imaginary.

"When I play the piano, I feel something that's not possible in real life," says Guo, who will offer her final Kenyon recital on April 24. "It's the same with math. Music is more personal, math more objective. But in math, too, you can experience things you don't see."

Guo, a math major and music minor, is an extraordinary practitioner in both realms. Her senior recital last fall, featuring sonatas by Beethoven and Liszt, earned her Kenyon's award for the best solo performance of the year-as her junior recital did last year. In math, she won two of the three math prizes this year. Meanwhile, she's completing an honors project on algebraic geometry.

"Music depends on richness in life. You need experience from daily activity to play music."

"Zoey has basically exhausted the math curriculum," says Associate Professor of Mathematics Judy Holdener, her advisor. "Her honors project involves work on a graduate level." In fact, next year she's headed to the Ph.D. program in mathematics at Northwestern University.

Guo relishes challenges and puts in long hours to meet them. "I may spend seven hours a day on math," she says. Then she'll switch to music, "to relax and use a different part of the brain." She loves playing on the College's new concert Steinway in Rosse Hall, and usually practices in the evening, between 7:00 and midnight. "All the security people know me," she smiles. "Sometimes they come to lock the building and find me practicing."

She particularly likes doing math at Kenyon because of the small classes and the insistence on writing and giving presentations. In her Chinese high school, "it was all about just solving the problem."

As for music, she credits her piano professor, John Reitz, for helping her mature to the point where she's confident fashioning her own interpretations of works. She has also come to experience performances as a kind of multi-level conversation-with herself, with the composer, with "an abstract illusion," and with the audience. "During my senior recital, I could feel what the audience was feeling, and that changed the way I played from moment to moment."

In music, she believes, a composer can impart an entire philosophy of life. Asked to elaborate, she smiles and says: "If I can describe it in words, it's not music any more. The magic is gone. That's why we play music."