How I Fell In Love With Math

November 9, 2025

The Origin

My earliest memory with math in school came in the form of memorizing the times table. This was my first taste of the kind of math that I still dislike to this day. It's what I like to call the "memorization" kind of math. I still feel a physical reaction whenever I have to add or multiply numbers, evaluate an integral by hand, etc. I feel like this is something a computer can do easily, so why should I have to? It’s obscene and a waste of time. If I already know how the process works (which is important), and a machine can do it with a 100% success rate, I don't need to. The same way writers leave spelling to the computers, I leave the number crunching to the computers as well.

That said, I didn’t dislike math as a kid. It was straightforward and predictable. But in middle school, when I first took Pre-Algebra, it got more abstract. The only issue was that the teachers tried their best to avoid addressing the ambiguity completely. I didn't know my problem at the time, but without any definitions or justification, I found it impossible to make sense of it all or retain any of it. On top of all that, much of the work was mindless "memorization" math. I ended up a C student in Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, and Algebra II, and a bit of a disruptive student too.

I'm not proud of myself for this, but I hit rock bottom when my SAT score would only go up in the Reading & Writing sections, and when I couldn't place into Calculus 1 in college. I tried my best in my first year of college to get decent grades in Trigonometry, Precalculus, Calculus 1 and Calculus 2 but I felt like something was missing. It felt vague to me, like I couldn't trust that everything I knew was consistent.

Then I ran into some issues the start of my sophomore year, specifically I struggled my in Linear Algebra and Statistics classes. This was due to a lack of effort on my part to be honest, and I ended up failing Statistics and getting a C in Linear Algebra. The funny thing was though that as I was struggling in these classes, I found myself drawn to Linear Algebra. That winter break I started downloading math textbooks and reading up.

The next semester I took Discrete Math, and my life changed forever. This was the first class I'd taken where ambiguity was not tolerated. The definitions were clear and motivated, and the proofs were rigorous. I felt like a part of my mind was complete and I could really trust what I knew. This was when I decided to switch my major from Computer Science to Mathematics.

For the first time in a really long time, I found myself looking forward to studying. But I couldn't help but wonder why. Since then I've been trying to find a good answer to the question,

The Appeal

"Why do you like math?" I've asked myself this question a lot and I've spent an absurd amount of time trying to answer it, and this is my current best answer. I like math because of two main things:

We do math in kind of imaginary "worlds" inside our minds, so its well-behaved.
In these imaginary "worlds", we can determine truth for ourselves with only our minds, using the rules and assumptions we take to be true, step-by-step, logically.

When I mean math is "well-behaved", I mean the math I do is static, unchanging. It makes it all very predictable. Other disciplines often focus on "wicked" environments. There's no guarentee that assumptions we make about the real world will stay the same. The math I like has no such concerns. The moment we agree on what something is, it stays the way it is. Why would $1+1 = 2$ be false tomorrow?

The other thing that I like about math is that unlike a lot of other fields, I don't have to trust in significance tests or machinery. You need nothing but your mind to do this kind of math right now. Normally I like to use a whiteboard or maybe some paper to help me keep ideas organized, but there is no requirement.

The Conclusion

Pure math sits somewhere between liberal arts like History or Philosophy and the "hard" sciences like Chemistry or Biology. This sweet spot, for me, makes it very comfortable to do math, and to understand what I'm doing. It gives me confidence when I think and a means to answer the endless questions that sit in my mind sometimes. Despite my rocky relationship with math, I've come to love this subject and I've been inspired to close my eyes and explore the possibilities.