Or alternatively, a (hopefully comedic) tale of my enemies to lovers arc with the most beautiful subject in the world.
(For legal reasons, I think all subjects are equally beautiful. More on that later.)
“Bruh.”
This word is, by far, the most common reaction I elicit from a listener upon making the admission that I might be a bit more interested in mathematics than the average person.
This should probably raise two questions:
What exactly do I mean by a bit more?
How exactly do I define the average person in this case?
And I’ll be utterly frank when I say that I don’t have definitive answers to either of the questions I’ve posed. The second question, I hope, can be understood to some extent with common knowledge of society and the habits of those around you. The answer to the first one, however, is what I’ll attempt to highlight as I narrate the series of events behind my, ahem, ‘interest’ in the subject.
If things weren’t evident from the various hints I’d dropped in plain sight a few lines earlier: I love maths.
But this story wasn’t always this rosy, oh no.
For the longest time in my life, I hated, absolutely hated maths.
First grade.
The year saw many milestones, including me writing my first-ever maths exam. I vaguely remember the day that I got my score: 19/20. My five-year-old brain hadn’t yet developed the perfectionistic tendencies I’m currently trying very hard to shed and so, it’s safe to say that I was more than thrilled to show my mother my answer sheet, only for my happiness to be met with cold words.
“Aarya, you lied to me. This is not how I’m raising you to be.”
I was astounded. “Ma, what do you mean?!”
“Aarya, you scored a 17, not a 19. How could you even lie to me like that?”
I took a close look at the top of the answer sheet. My mother was right, it indeed was a 17, but the horizontal line of the number 7 was curved a little more than usual, making it look like a 9 instead.
And no matter how much I tried explaining it to my mother, I doubt she believed it. Honestly, looking back, I doubt I’d believe myself too.
Darn my teacher’s cursive handwriting!
That day was when it all began.
One bad memory that wasn’t even the fault of the subject I was learning was more than enough to sow the seeds of prejudice in my tiny heart. I mean, isn’t that a natural human tendency? To shove the blame on literally anything or anyone that isn’t you? But again, I was only five and my mind could barely comprehend the intricacies of the human ego and so I let hatred grow.
And thanks to the oh-so-wonderful way maths is taught in schools, my hatred surely and steadily grew.
“Memorise this equation. It’s important for the exam.”
“Mark this question; I’ll ask it for the exam.”
“Look, you’ll understand this concept in higher classes, so just learn it by heart now.”
For ten years, this was the story of every maths class. Memorise a formula, write all the steps and score marks in the exam. There was absolutely no instruction regarding what exactly it is that we were doing and more importantly, why we were doing it. And because I didn’t quite understand the logic, I ended up being a nervous wreck on the day before every maths exam, which only made me more prone to being careless while actually writing the exam.
Mathematics felt so incredibly mechanical and so daunting and I hated every second of it.
I just couldn’t wait for tenth grade to be behind me so that I could finally drop the stupid subject.
Then tenth grade happened.
Tenth grade is usually a year of reckoning for people. However, I walked into the tenth-grade maths classroom with no such thought in my mind. In seven months, I was finally going to be free of my tormentor and I couldn’t wait to begin counting the days until I could say the most elated farewell to the subject that had made my school life a nightmare.
That was until I met my maths teacher.
In that first maths class, he was able to capture my attention like no other maths teacher before him. There was no mention of needlessly learning anything by heart because he went to great lengths to explain the logic behind every concept. And if the reasoning behind anything he taught was genuinely above the scope of a tenth-grade maths class, he’d ask us to meet him during the break, when he’d try to break down complex mathematical ideas into the simplest forms possible.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t want a mathematics class to end.
I was so intrigued by what I was learning that it prompted me to read up on the history of the subject. From Pythagoras to Descartes, Aryabhata to Germain and Gauss to Ramanujan, I was left mesmerized by the lives of greats who lived and loved mathematics like it was the centre of their very being.
And this love, it’s a very powerful thing, you know?
People say that love makes you blind. While I see where this opinion comes from, I beg to differ. I feel that what love does is that it changes your perspective. And sure, while a change of perspective can sometimes make you do very foolish things, it can also be one of the best things to ever happen to you.
In my case thankfully, it was the latter.
Maths classes at school coupled with side quests on the Internet every evening made me realize that, at the very root of it, mathematics was nothing more than a language. But it was no ordinary language.
Simply put, mathematics was the language of the Universe.
Being a language enthusiast my entire life, this realization shook the very foundation of the way I perceived Life, The Universe and Everything. I just knew that I had to immerse myself in this subject, that I had to learn more.
It’s safe to say that by this point, my intense hatred for the subject had evaporated. If anything, it was replaced by this warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart every time I was in maths class or when someone was talking about maths.
One evening, I was browsing YouTube as fifteen-year-olds do and I chanced upon a video by Numberphile (one of the most popular maths channels on YouTube, run by the wonderful Brady Haran), where Simon Singh was talking about Fermat’s Last Theorem.
In a nutshell, Fermat’s Last Theorem states that the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ does not hold true for any three integers x, y and z and for any integer n >2. This theorem was left without proof for 358 years until Andrew Wiles released the first successful proof of the conjecture in 1994.
I was awestruck.
Right after that video, I excitedly clicked on another Numberphile video with Professor Edward Frenkel talking about the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the six remaining unsolved Millenium Problems (Fermat’s Last Theorem was the seventh). The video left me almost euphoric, and I jumped to a third video by Haran with Dr James Grimes, talking about e, or the Euler’s number.
At the end of almost eleven magical minutes, it dawned on me.
I was utterly and hopelessly in love.
Tenth grade is usually a year of reckoning for people. In one way, it was a year of reckoning for me too. And while it had its several ups and downs, I will forever remember tenth grade very fondly. Because it was the year I fell in love for the first time.
I fell in love with maths and this time, there was no looking back.
At this juncture, I’ll admit that I do think all subjects are equally beautiful.
But some subjects are clearly more beautiful than others. (George Orwell, anyone?)
Mathematics, I’m looking at you.
Now, one can argue that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. I know, trust me, I know.
But if you’re willing to give maths a chance as I did all those years ago, maybe, just maybe, you’ll see it too.
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