I don’t know why, but I love math. I’m not necessarily great at it, but I love numbers and the way they fit together. Oftentimes when I am doing things, such as writing lines of poetry, I aim for mathematical symmetry or a pattern of some sort. I don’t know why, but it’s very hard for me to break it - I keep coming back to it. Even if I do something which isn’t mathematically lined up, I might line it up to fit the numbers more than the objective of the task.

I remember briefly considering majoring in mathematics in college - but what I was mostly interested in was the theories behind the numbers and systems. It’s no surprise in the “olden days” philosophers were mathematicians and mathematicians were philosophers. My instructor - a math major student teacher - also agreed with me - neither of us wanted to do math in a “practical” way - the only thing that is that practical for a pure math major is like actuarial statistics (working for an insurance company). He was pretty young and I remember how weird it was having this long-haired guy teaching us the class and every single one of his examples was about drinking beer or getting drunk.

Also, the book we used was AWESOME because it didn’t just have math and theories, but all these biographies of mathematicians. It was so fascinating. Man, there are proofs which people have tried to get for hundreds of years - like we still don’t know why some things work out the way they do. It was pretty inspiring.

When I was a kid, we saw a fantastic Disney cartoon about numbers in nature - I have tried to look that up but never found it again. When my kids were a lot younger, I remember I would always try to find them math “stories” and puzzle books. I also always loved those logic puzzles - you know the ones where there were 5 people and one lived in a red house and smoked Pall Malls etc. (does anyone else remember these?).

Anyway, I love math and numbers and have a fascination with them. Maybe I just have OCD.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 3:49 am and is filed under Insanity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.