My Relationship With Math: It Was Good, Until It Got Complicated

Last week, I bought a TI-89 calculator.  It’s like the calculator you used to get by calculus in high school, only this one is better.

I’ve wanted one for a long time.  My freshman year at Boston College, I got a TI-89 because I was well on my way to majoring in math.  This union lasted all of two weeks because someone permanently deprived it from my possession without my permission.  I never bothered to replace it because, being Japanese, I learned math without using a calculator. Besides, since I studied “pure” math rather than “applied” math, I rarely saw numbers by my junior year so a calculator hardly would have been useful.

But I never forgot that my union with a TI-89 was abruptly cut short.  Now that I’m in a profession that requires me to crunch some numbers, mostly related to boring financial statements, I was constantly reminded of my detachment issues.  So I just went ahead and spent $150 on a calculator that is so powerful it can solve world hunger and graph in four dimensions if we had a fourth.  The calculator is an overkill and I’ve been showing it off to everyone at the office who couldn’t care less.

I work in a profession with colleagues whose strengths are mostly in areas outside of numbers (excepting my former office mate who was also a math major), but it’s no exaggeration to say that math got me to where I am.  Most of my early academic career constituted achievement in math and very little else.  It wasn’t that I was particularly skilled in math; with American math education an abomination, my parents sent me to juku where I learned math that was more appropriate to my grade level. Since I’d already “learned” what was being taught at my high school, it would have taken a miracle for me not to have excelled in math.  I used my good fortune of just happening to be in a country where mathematical mediocrity passed for mathematical excellence to inflate my cumulative GPA in high school, get into college where again I inflated my grades with math, then got into a good law school–albeit one year later than I wanted and where, incidentally, I inflated my GPA by focusing on the only courses that dealt with numbers:  tax–and landed a nice job.

Math, then, was what I was good at and not necessarily what I enjoyed.  Truth be told, I liked math, but it was only to the extent that I was good at it.  For the longest time, it was the only thing I was good at, the only subject I could claim I excelled.  People who know me from middle and high school periods probably associate me more with math than politics or law.  I liked math back then, but not in the way I loved the stock market and history.  I liked math for what it did for me, not for what it was.

It wasn’t until well into college, when I started taking advanced courses, that I learned to appreciate math’s magnificence.  It’s somewhat tragic that I grew passionate about math just as I stopped understanding it.  For obvious reasons, the trick that I used in high school–“I did it before, so I can do it better the second time around”–wasn’t going to work for too long.   I began being exposed to new math in sophomore year, and by senior year, I was completely clueless as to what was going on in class.  I confess that  I collect the semi-annual college-level academic journal that I receive as a member of member of Pi Mu Epsilon, a math honor society, solely as a status symbol.

Still, I did have that brief year to two years where math provided great satisfaction.  That period in which I learned Combinatorics and Complex Analysis presented me with the wonders of the world.  It helped that I had a great professor, Marc Reeder.  On the first day of my first class with him, he covered the topic I was already well versed in, but I could tell he was special.  He not only has a knack for explaining things in a way that one can easily understand and visualize but he also gives occasional life lessons that are deeply reflective.  To see what I mean, watch his interview discussing his latest paper.   I learned as much about life from him as I did math.  If I failed to understand what he was teaching–and I did in Modern Algebra–the fault lies with my limited abilities, not his teaching.

It’s been so long since I studied math, I don’t think I can ever get back into it again.  But I proudly consider it as one of the three intellectual interests that I’ve pursued in my life.  I’m fond of describing the differences in the way my three interests approach a problem this way:

Let’s say you have problem X and are looking for the solution Y.  In math, you start with X and take logical steps to either find Y or conclude that Y doesn’t exist.  In political science, you look at X, debate it all day and night and agree to disagree about what Y is.  In law, you begin with Y and look for ad hoc rationalizations that will get you from X to Y.

I still find the legal method the biggest bullshit, the political method most enjoyable and the mathematical method the most satisfying, even if I understand it the least.