Living Math

I don't have much time for blogging anymore.  Let's treat this blog as a dead archive—at least for now.  I ask y'all still check it once 2 weeks or so, perhaps I will have something new.

One can tell someone's passion by seeing what they talk about the most, and in this case my most often topic here is about math.

It turns out I don't necessarily study math anymore.  Look, if I had to study math, I'd give up on a problem after 20 minutes or so and look at the solution and try to see what I need to do better next.

But I don't.  I look at my solutions and writeups from lectures line by line, and get only the smallest step, and then keeps grinding.  Eventually I do teach myself to do something significant, and I solve my previous problems either.  But I always keep trying after just getting 1 hint, perhaps a small line of letters squeezed in a corner.

And that's really inefficient.  I sit almost all of my hours in my room.  Sometimes I get distracted and it frustrates me, but mostly, I just don't wanna study math, which is, of course, with a specific goal in mind to get high scores in competitions or develop "mathematical maturity" as they call it.  If I did I'd just be a lot more optimized and organized with things.  I'm not.

All I crave for is the moment where that sudden flash of clarity happens and all of a sudden I just know what to do.  And I enjoy the grind, every single line and piece of scratch paper along the way.  And I absolutely hate it when people call me disorganized or suggest I try another approach to managing or learning things.  I absolutely do, but I have neither the audacity or rights to tell them.

I'll just admit it, I'm an insanely crazy useless piece of person who finds some sort of self-absorbed escapism and fantasy from mathematics.  Yes, from my fundamental worldview I'm extremely useless to society.  I admit it.  But that doesn't mean I don't care about life—I still try to actively spark a bit of warmth in this otherwise cold real life.  And it makes me extremely happy as well.  To parody a famous phrase, "think a way globally, act the completely different way locally."

I even refuse to acknowledge there are any applications of math because to me those are useless—if you wanna watch a movie and enjoy the plot why care about all the marketing.

In other words, I treat math as a lifestyle.  I live math.  And that's almost impossible to defend because surely math studies are ambitious or looking to get more experience with things, and there's nearly no one to relate to.  Anything else like my computer programming are all hobbies for me, math is my (quite solitary) lifestyle.

And high school is about to suck all the free time out of me... but still, for me, math is the purest form of fantasy.  Goodbye, my precious numbers.