This Math Memoir was submitted by @golda.abs on instagram.
My maths journey
My earliest memory of mathematics was when I was six
years old. I remember talking to my older brother in the backyard and asking
the question, ‘what is the largest number?’. He answered that infinity was the
biggest number since numbers never end. I didn’t understand it at first but then
he explained further that if I take any huge number- I shouted, ‘one million’,
we could always add the digit ‘one’ on top of that, like one million plus one.
I recall that I immediately comprehended that response and was satisfied.
Nowadays I have a much better understanding of infinity and as well, I know
that it’s not a number, but rather a concept in mathematics.
That same year, I began elementary school. I wasn’t
obsessed with maths yet, as I much preferred English and writing class. I read
many books weekly and I decided that I was going to be an author when I grew
up. Then in middle school, I started developing an interest in science and
mathematics. I am privileged to come from an intelligent family and talking to
my dad about physics every morning on the drive to school has greatly helped me
to get to where I stand today. I fed my curiously about the world by walking to
the public library and borrowing the most interesting books that I could find
on those topics, which was a big switch from my usual line of fiction reading.
Also, I am lucky to have acquired an excellent memory which has certainty
served me well. In school in Australia, there is a yearly mathematics
competition for students called the Australian Westpac mathematics competition
which you must pay to enter and can do it while at school. Although the
teachers encouraged it, it wasn’t compulsory of course but I joined every
single year. I was very competitive- I still am to this day, so I wanted to get
the highest mark possible. We had Naplan too, every second year and I excelled
in the mathematics section which may have propelled me to continue working on
the subject in my own time. In my country, high school begins in year 7. It was
a real stress. I suffer from a type of anxiety called social anxiety and this
really slowed down my learning. I didn’t think about maths much in the first
year, I just followed the general curriculum and focused on all of the
schoolwork. Year 8 though changed everything. I was 13 years old and that was
the year in which I became obsessed with improving my intelligence. I did
things like spend hours nightly memorising shuffled decks of cards, learning
Morse code, reciting hundreds of digits of Pi from memory, doing hard times
tables in my head in every possible spare moment, watching every single YouTube
video on maths and physics that I could find and writing down all the proofs so
that I could show my family. I was fascinated with the golden ratio and
Fibonacci sequence, the Mandelbrot set, chaos theory, the millennium prize
problems- particularly the Riemann hypothesis, mathematical paradoxes, cool
ideas and shapes like the Klein bottle and the torus and really all patterns in
nature. I also thought I had figured out human psychology and body
language from my own observations. I actually probably learnt the most from
that year. The following four years were really tough. I still had a keen
interest in maths, but the problem was that it was generally the last class of
every day. For me, this was the time when I was the most anxious which meant
that I couldn’t listen, let alone understand a word my teacher was saying. When
school finished for the day, I would walk home and the first thing I would do
is go to my room and teach myself all the work covered in that lesson.
Afterwards, not only did I have homework to do but I also had all the maths
questions that my classmates had already completed during the lesson, as I
wasn’t sound enough to solve them in school. This also meant that I didn’t do
well in long tests as it was extremely difficult for me to sit down at my desk
for two hours straight and complete it. I did do really well on the short
quizzes though since they only took about twenty minutes to finish, and that
confused my teacher since she genuinely thought that i just wasn’t good at the
subject. I also used to find my own methods to solve the algebra problems since
I had lots of time to find the best method that worked for me as I did it all
at home. My teacher got really upset at me for this when she noticed and said
in front of my whole grade that I would fail completely. Tough times. Anyway,
since my school didn’t cover calculus, I took it up and learnt calculus one and
two when I was 16 years old. It wasn’t difficult since I was already familiar
with teaching myself all different kinds of maths. I made it through and
graduated at age 17. Since then, I have partaken in some small-scale maths
contests and I began playing chess which I’m hoping will improve my logical
thinking and analytical skills.
Today, I’m still 17 but my love for mathematics is
just as strong as ever. I’m at the point in my life that I can safely say that
my feelings won’t ever go away. I’m about to start higher mathematics training
with an online tutor and will eventually study it professionally in university.
I like calculus and topology and I prefer pure mathematics over applied. I
would like to be a theoretical physicist and a mathematician someday. I still
enjoy writing and I’m already a science communicator to some degree. I believe
that a passion for mathematics may just be the best possible one that exists.
Mathematics is the highest form of knowledge and is the language of this
beautiful universe.
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