- #1
ZComet
- 18
- 0
Hello everyone. I am ZComet and I hail from Malaysia. I am glad to come upon such a vibrant forum dedicated towards physics and mathematics. It's very nice to meet like-minded people such as yourselves around here. I am not a mathematician (yet), but I plan to take pure mathematics as my second undergraduate degree in due time. Though my current skills as of yet are high-school level I would try my best to contribute to this wonderful forum.
The reason I came here though is to ask for your opinion on my motivation for pursuing mathematics in its purest form. The thing is, every time I talk to people about my obesssion with mathematics and why I want to pursue maths as a career, they always say things about how wonderful it is to be able to use maths to make better decisions in business, using maths to make truckloads of money in actuaries or fiancial analysis, using maths to keep accounts, using maths to cook rice, etc, etc.
Everyone I talked to (in my country, at least) seemed to percieve maths as nothing more than a convinient secondary skill for the intent of making money or complementing the primary skill of some other career. But applied maths is not my passion at all. I am not interested in knowing how much money I can make out of algebra or to what extent can it be implemented in industrial practice, for instance. What I am passionate about instead is to what extent the knowledge of algebra goes currently, and how can I contribute to expanding the knowledge in that area. You see, my true passion lies in pure mathematics. I want to study maths for its own sake with little regard to application. I want to tackle maths as a true discipline on its own.
I consider mathematics as a sport or art on par with basketball or painting. I am passionate to seeing the beauty of how do elite mathematicians solve problems or prove statements using the shortest, neatest solutions possible. I feel delight in uncovering alternative routes in equations that may provide a solution in lesser steps than conventionally expected. I want to see how they write their steps down, how beautiful do they prioritize the parts of the problem to solve first, and how by doing so eliminates the remaining steps needed to reach the goal. In addition I want to delve deep into the techniques to calculate better, such as reducing mental invocation of numbers into single syllables (example "seven" as "se") to shorten calculation, or mental exercises to increase the ability to imagine in three dimensional spaces, and so on. (by the way, this is exactly the reason why people ridiculed my obession with maths).
For the same reason, I wanted to do pure maths as my second undergraduate degree simply because it gives me the opportunity to take part in math olympiads or other similar competitions. As I said I view maths as a sport. I would like to pit my skills against other people - whom had likely to receive full emotional and educational support from their family and teachers, while I was strongly discouraged by everyone and gained my genius in maths mostly from self-study. I felt that despite my unfortunate background I still might be able to win those competitions. Winning or at least arriving to the finals would be something I would be very proud of.
I was extremely unfortunate that during my high school years I was not given the chance to participate in maths competitions despite my oustanding talent as my parents and my teachers in my country at that time are all doctor-minded people. They forced me to keep a mindset to the MD and focus on my studies. I am to forget the math competitons as it is a waste of time. I had no idea how at those teenage years I got fooled into obeying my parents, and now I am about to graduate with poor grades from my first undegraduate degree in biotechnology due to lack of passion. I learned the hard way though, that maths is my one and only ambition that cannot be replaced by one another.
Most likely I will face a lot of opposition when I do my second degree. People will say I am "still not giving up my childish dreams", that I should be better off making money as a cubicle slave instead of dedicating my life into cerebral pursuits, but to hell with them. This is MY LIFE - not THEIRS. If they so boldly fight for the right to be themselves, than I too want the right to be myself. I am a person with potential to be a mathematician and that's who I am and that's who I watnt to be.
So uh...what is your say on me? Am I being...immature like what everyone else say about me? It's really nothing wrong with being myself, right? And uh please excuse me if my English sounds so bookish. English is not my first language.
The reason I came here though is to ask for your opinion on my motivation for pursuing mathematics in its purest form. The thing is, every time I talk to people about my obesssion with mathematics and why I want to pursue maths as a career, they always say things about how wonderful it is to be able to use maths to make better decisions in business, using maths to make truckloads of money in actuaries or fiancial analysis, using maths to keep accounts, using maths to cook rice, etc, etc.
Everyone I talked to (in my country, at least) seemed to percieve maths as nothing more than a convinient secondary skill for the intent of making money or complementing the primary skill of some other career. But applied maths is not my passion at all. I am not interested in knowing how much money I can make out of algebra or to what extent can it be implemented in industrial practice, for instance. What I am passionate about instead is to what extent the knowledge of algebra goes currently, and how can I contribute to expanding the knowledge in that area. You see, my true passion lies in pure mathematics. I want to study maths for its own sake with little regard to application. I want to tackle maths as a true discipline on its own.
I consider mathematics as a sport or art on par with basketball or painting. I am passionate to seeing the beauty of how do elite mathematicians solve problems or prove statements using the shortest, neatest solutions possible. I feel delight in uncovering alternative routes in equations that may provide a solution in lesser steps than conventionally expected. I want to see how they write their steps down, how beautiful do they prioritize the parts of the problem to solve first, and how by doing so eliminates the remaining steps needed to reach the goal. In addition I want to delve deep into the techniques to calculate better, such as reducing mental invocation of numbers into single syllables (example "seven" as "se") to shorten calculation, or mental exercises to increase the ability to imagine in three dimensional spaces, and so on. (by the way, this is exactly the reason why people ridiculed my obession with maths).
For the same reason, I wanted to do pure maths as my second undergraduate degree simply because it gives me the opportunity to take part in math olympiads or other similar competitions. As I said I view maths as a sport. I would like to pit my skills against other people - whom had likely to receive full emotional and educational support from their family and teachers, while I was strongly discouraged by everyone and gained my genius in maths mostly from self-study. I felt that despite my unfortunate background I still might be able to win those competitions. Winning or at least arriving to the finals would be something I would be very proud of.
I was extremely unfortunate that during my high school years I was not given the chance to participate in maths competitions despite my oustanding talent as my parents and my teachers in my country at that time are all doctor-minded people. They forced me to keep a mindset to the MD and focus on my studies. I am to forget the math competitons as it is a waste of time. I had no idea how at those teenage years I got fooled into obeying my parents, and now I am about to graduate with poor grades from my first undegraduate degree in biotechnology due to lack of passion. I learned the hard way though, that maths is my one and only ambition that cannot be replaced by one another.
Most likely I will face a lot of opposition when I do my second degree. People will say I am "still not giving up my childish dreams", that I should be better off making money as a cubicle slave instead of dedicating my life into cerebral pursuits, but to hell with them. This is MY LIFE - not THEIRS. If they so boldly fight for the right to be themselves, than I too want the right to be myself. I am a person with potential to be a mathematician and that's who I am and that's who I watnt to be.
So uh...what is your say on me? Am I being...immature like what everyone else say about me? It's really nothing wrong with being myself, right? And uh please excuse me if my English sounds so bookish. English is not my first language.