Me and Math

I've just gotta say that I love math. I really don't hear that enough in my everyday life. It seems like many people around me, even in academia, see math as merely a means to an end, or as high school hurdle that they once stumbled over and thankfully never have to use again. Well, this is not a blog to convince anybody else to like math. Its just an expression of how much I like math.

I feel like I was introduced to math kinda by mistake. What I mean by 'math' here is the math I took after set theory. See, prior to this stuff, I pretty much hated math. I especially hated that we weren't allowed to use programming calculators on tests. See, I had somewhat of an affair with computer programming back in high school. This affair lasted until about my sophomore or junior year of college.

I always thought that math was stupid. My theory was who wants to sit and add up numbers all day? What would be the point of just using formulas that have already been discovered? I especially grew irritated when I would learn something like the Law of Sines, Law of Cosines, how to invert a matrix, or how to use row reduction to solve a system of equations. I would learn these things first by programming things into a calculator. Then I was told I couldn't use these programs on tests, which only frustrated my relationship with math. What's the point of using 20th century teaching methods to teach math to a 21st century classroom?

I remember entering college with a major in computer science. I was a pretty good programmer and this was the middle of the dot com era, when everybody was making money on the Internet. It just so happened that a computer science major at my undergrad consists of so many math classes that all I needed to have a math minor were a few classes - among these classes was set theory.

Set theory was a class that changed my life.

This class was like philosophy and debate for mathematicians, complete with paradoxes and all. But this was more structured than my debate classes in high school. In high school, we had topics like "Capital Punishment is Justified" and had to argue either the affirmative or the negative. The person who won was the person who made the better arguments or spoke more eloquently - not the one who spoke the truth (because truth here is ambiguous).

In math, its all about the truth! We assume only the basic necessities (which are agreed upon) and prove EVERYTHING else. There's no room for ambiguity and no room for errors. That's just beautiful to me.

I remember when I first proved the irrationality sqrt(2). All through middle school, I can remember being told that certain numbers are irrational, but never really understood what that meant or why it was true. When I first saw that proof, it was just an amazing sight. And the most beautiful thing is that each step followed logically from the one before it, and step one was just a statement of the assumption. There was no citing a survey, or claim that "correlation implies causation".

It was just pure beauty. And what made it more beautiful was its simplicity.

I don't often get to talk with people who share this same love of math, but when I do get such an occurrence I sit and smile.

Today, I'm smiling!