One of the earliest memories of my mother was when I was a kid and she would teach me math in the living room. I was just old enough to talk and walk around at the time. I remember that she would create a 10 by 10 grid on a piece of paper and have me fill it up with numbers - to count from 1 to 100. I would pull out a pencil and start writing out the numbers, saying out loud each number as I wrote it down.

It was actually pretty fun for me at the time. I liked using a pencil and writing out numbers, and I liked filling out the grid nicely. I remember having one of my first “aha” moments when I saw the pattern that the 20’s are just the 10’s except with a 2 instead of a 1. I liked looking through the grid and trying to find the cool numbers, like the palindromes or the big ones like 100.

I only have two memories from kindergarten - playing Cubix race’n’robots on Playstation 1, and the time the teacher asked the class what the number after 10 was. Although this isn’t an actual achievement, I thought it was cool that I was the only one that new it was 11, when the rest of the class was shouting out numbers like “a hundred!” and “a million!”.

Ever since then, I’ve always like math. Despite moving from India to America, and switching schools across India and Queens, Math was a constant that I felt good at no matter where I went. In elementary school I was always the one raising my hand to answer questions, and genuinely really liked class because I would learn new and exciting things like fractions or square roots.

Time progressed and math got a little bit more advanced. Towards the end of middle school I felt confident that I was good at math. I joined the math team at my school and as a team we made it to the state-wide level at Albany, NY. At the city/county level I did a good job, but participating in the state level really humbled me because I ended up doing the worst on my team. I still had a lot of fun though, and competed a couple more times in the Purple math contest and at a local competition in the bronx where I came first place.

In high school I wasn’t on the math team. At that point, the only time I competed was in the AMC/AIME competition. Now that I actually had friends, I mostly just stuck to taking AP classes in school, but not really doing much outside of school. I still excelled in math in school, and I liked proving theorems and learning new formulas.

My first year at SUNY Stony Brook was the first time in my life where I wasn’t taking a math class. I took intro classes to Computer science, Chemistry, and a little bit of chinese on the side. I was having a good time at school - learning things, making friends, and getting involved on campus.

Something just didn’t feel right to me though. I was learning so many things but I didn’t know any more about numbers. I knew more about computers but was starting to forget formulas about math. I had a feeling in my chest that something just wasn’t right. In my mind I had always thought learning and math were inextricable. How could I feel like I was learning when I was forgetting my math?

I wasn’t a math major at the time, but this feeling made me want to be. I spoke to my advisor and friends about if it would make sense to do an applied math double major. I wasn’t sure if it would give me enough value for the amount of work that it would add. I consulted some friends about it too. To sum up the advice I got: It would be a lot of work and it won’t help if you’re going into software engineering. I didn’t like the sound of that advice, but I knew it was right for me.

I continued as usual at Stony brook, but it still felt wrong. It would be a lot of work to get a double major and it wouldn’t help me in the future, so why would I do it? I started to feel overtime that the usefulness of the major mattered less and less to me. I just wanted to learn and do more math, I didn’t care how useful it was. Later that year I ended up declaring the double major and filling out the following semester with math classes. I just did the major for fun.

That moment - what I deliberately chose to learn math even though there was no point made me realize how much it mattered to me. I’m out of school now, but when I read books or watch Youtube Videos, I like to pick things that teach me anything new about math. Whether it’s statistics or number theory doesn’t really matter to me - just the process of learning is fun.