In my foolish youth, I felt really ambivalent toward math. My father’s a theoretical physicist, and my brother was supposed to be one also, but it somehow didn’t work out. I used to think that my gentler upbringing stemmed from my father’s recognition of his failure with my brother, but recently I’ve changed my mind. I think that, as a girl, I wasn’t supposed to be as smart as a boy, so the pressures on me were lessened, but not eliminated. What I’m trying to say is that I think that by the time I was born, my father was still laboring under the illusion that it wasn’t too late to turn at least a portion of his offspring into theoretical physicists.

Anyway – from a very early age, my dad would try to teach me math from colorful Russian textbooks perpetually meant for younger children. When I was in 5^th grade, we were using a 4^th-grade Soviet math book, if my memory serves me well, and a 3^rd-grade one if it doesn’t. I really hated these lessons and tried to get out of them at every turn. Math was supposed to be my weak point – it was as if I had some kind of chronic and embarrassing illness that needed to be gotten rid of before I reached adulthood. I always thought I was no good at math, and never really liked it much until the latter years of high school, when I tried to pass out of pre-calc straight into calc. This required some tutoring in the summer, which I ended up enjoying. To my surprise, I also liked BC Calc, even though it was terrible bullshit, and when I was deciding what courses to take here I knew that I would need to take some math at a reasonably high level to feel at all good about my College Education.

The way I see it now, math is better than everything else. In the hierarchy of disciplines, it’s at the top – there’s even a Russian song my dad used to sing that conveyed that message. Unlike any humanities-related thing it’s not a bunch of pretentious morons spouting incoherent academic jargon that anyone who’s even remotely arcticulate can synthesize. Also, math isn’t subject to the kind of ugly political atmosphere that turns history into History of the Party or Marxism-Leninism and biology into Lamarckian rubbish and physics into a race against time to create a giant explosive that will kill everybody. My dad would disagree with me there, saying that physics is the basis of the universe, that without it the world has no practical future, and I agree to some extent, but prefer math anyway. This is because if you’re lucky enough to be really good at math, you don’t need a computer or money to buy a computer with. You enter a higher plane of reality and spend your time playing an intricate game using only your brain. You don’t need a computer, you don’t need money to buy a computer with, you don’t need other intellectual stimulation, and you definitely don’t need other people. You’re invincible.

For those of us who aren’t brilliant, however, math is still very very important. This is because it develops your (my, his) brains. If you’re able to learn math well, then I think you can make a good stab at succeeding in the Real World (which, as you know, I’m an expert in). I think the following consideration pretty much sums up how important math is: an average mathematician could, with no preparation, probably make a passable historian, but no historian, no matter how brilliant, could just randomly become a mathematician. QED, no pun intended.

I’m pretty sure that I didn’t end up feeling this way about math on my own (since my views have been painstakingly crafted by my parents over the course of over a decade), but it’s how I feel in my heart of hearts and I can’t really change that without resorting to drugs or a lobotomy. That’s it. I hope this didn’t bore you.