My story is a bit of an unconventional one I guess as it is somewhat a combination of mathematics, science and philosophy, but I will try to be as thorough as possible while only mentioning the other two in passing:
From the age of 3, I started to wonder about the world, in what one today would call philosophical terms, which incidentally I would not acknowledge without any feelings of disgust until my early twenties. From around an age of 12, I became enthralled with algebra and geometry, culminating in analytic geometry. At 14, a few years before learning anything about calculus in high school, I glimpsed what was something very special: by geometrically determining the slope of a tangent in between two points on the curves of ##y=x, y=x^2## and ##y=x^3##, I conjectured a curious relationship between them and the curve. This to me at the time was an intuitive proof of something special, I immediately tried telling my teacher at the time but he quickly shot it down, wanting me to work on the problems he asked, not try to prove some conjecture coming from my procrastination; had he responded more positively, I might've probably been a mathematician today. I digress.
Around the age of 16 when we began learning calculus, I immediately remembered my conjecture from a few years back, and I delved deeper and deeper into mathematics then. At this point in time, I convinced myself that the only guaranteed route to absolute certainty in reasoning was through mathematics and conjectured that all of mathematics was a massive logical structure. Before this point, I was great at all 'word and language' subjects but only mediocre at math. Hereafter however I actually changed my way of reasoning about things, always trying to think about things in a way that would allow mathematical reasoning to follow. As a consequence I immediately started to excel more at mathematics, while everything else dropped a grade lower. I gained a stance focusing very strongly on pure mathematics and I developed a strong dislike for all applied math, including trigonometry which seemed trivial to me and especially physics which seemed hopelessly dirty. I became a Platonist, a naive logicist and, practically speaking, a classical purist, luckily never having yet been introduced to any views or products of formalism and yet fully unaware of Gödel's devastating blows to logicism (which I would learn early on a few years later in university).
I kept this classical purist stance up until I was 18, during my final year of high school. It was here when I started actually seeing the mathematical beauty in physical laws, instead of them being arbitrary formulas to learn by heart in order to plug-and-chug. Listening in on a mechanics lecture my older brother was attending, I was introduced to dimensional analysis. From that point on I quickly applied it to all high school physics formulae I knew, only to discover I could discover laws of physics by pure algebraic reasoning. I very quickly discovered the Planck units as well in this manner, and tried to come up with new formula based on my knowledge of some others. I then showed it all to my physics teacher, with whom I had a strained relationship due to my disdain of physics up to that point. He however responded in a very positive fashion and told me that some of these formula described some other physical phenomena and how they could be corrected and had been corrected historically.
From that point on I was hooked on physics and saw in it much more beauty than mathematics could offer. After going to university, I ended up studying physics, some mathematics courses and later on some philosophy as well. During all that time, my initial views on the certainty which only mathematical reasoning could bestow upon one was irreparably demolished, especially after discovering that there were undecidable problems in mathematics and especially upon learning that the continuum hypothesis was independent of two opposing axiomatizations of mathematics. Curiously, I also noticed that both math students and professors were much more rigorous formalists and proof driven than anyone in the physics department, who all agreed that the familiar classical mathematics of the 17th, 18th and 19th century was wonderful, but who were woefully unaware and/or uncaring for much or any of the developments in mathematics thereafter.
It was around this same time that I became a bit familiar with string theory in physics, which I first passionately embraced for its mathematical beauty and I felt and recognised very strongly my earlier purist mathematical stance, dare I say hope, at work in string theory, giving an unshakeable faith that the theory must be true. Eventually however something kept telling me that this was not the correct way forward for physics. Moreover, after learning more deeply about chaos, nonlinear dynamics, fractal geometry and nonstandard forms of logic, I gave up on both string theory and mathematics and never looked back. Instead, I looked forward towards physics and very other interdisciplinairy areas in all of science, where time and time again it seems as if these novel late 20th century mathematical tools, along with some others, are of much more use for accurately describing many currently misunderstood phenomena and discovering unknown phenomena, often much more so than anything that has been offered from conventional mathematics, which tends to have been tried before unsuccessfully.
because I like to know the meaning behind things