I
wasn't born a mathematician, who is? It's not something I picked up at home
either. My mother was an English teacher (for non English speaking children).
My father was a university professor in the Zoology department, whose research
was in population genetics and insects. Though it is true that he was in charge of
teaching statistics to Biology graduate students, as a child I was influenced
by his love of nature and wasn't really aware of his statistical expertise. I
remember us talking about these topics only much later when I was already using
statistics myself.
Genetics
may have played a role, though I have no direct evidence. I was told that my
maternal grandmother was good at math in school, but did not pursue this since
it was not considered practical for a young woman back then. My father said he
found math hard in school, as he made many mistakes in calculations and didn't
get the right answers. He became an expert in practical statistics much later
in life. My older brother received similar genes, he too was drawn to the exact
sciences at school and became an expert in computers and network security.
As
a child I was good at math, I enjoyed riddles and logic. I always felt more
comfortable around numbers than around people. However I did not dream about
becoming a mathematician, I didn't think of this as a goal until much later. I
don't have a lot of childhood memories, I tend to forget most of what happened.
I do have several mathematics related memories, looking back I can see the path
even though I was not aware of it then.
………
On
summer vacations my father would sometimes take me to work, so that my mother
would have some time for herself, I suppose. In the lab I remember looking
through a microscope, using complicated scales to measure small weights. I
liked the desk calculator with orange tubes displaying digits. My favorite toys
were field counters, mechanical devices that counted how many times you pressed
a button, useful for counting things as you see them without remembering the
current sum. There were more sophisticated counters that had several buttons,
for counting several types of events at the same time, giving independent
counts for each event as well as a total for all events. I spent hours pressing
the buttons and looking at the digits move, you needed to push harder when
moving several digits mechanically, changing 199 to 200 for example.
………
When
I was 8 years old my family moved to England for a year, my father was on a
university sabbatical. I could not speak English beyond a few basic sentences
("my name is…") and it took a few weeks for me to communicate at
school. The teacher found out that she could give me math workbooks to keep me
busy.
………
I
had a set of playing cards of passenger airplanes, each with a picture and a
few numeric parameters such as maximal speed or wingspan. I don't remember the
rules of the game, whether it was a variant of Go Fish or War, but the parameter
values could be used to decide which card was better. I used to sort the cards
according to each parameter, finding the rank for each card. Some cards were
clearly better than others in all parameters, while other cards were generally weak
but had a surprising strong parameter - important to know when playing.
………
When I was sick I would stay at home, which meant I had the apartment to myself and could watch TV all morning. There was only one channel to watch, and the morning shows were educational – sometimes used as lessons in school. There were many shows I enjoyed, one of these was a cartoon series about math. Each episode used a short animated story to explain a concept. The one I remember the most was about a village of fractions that had to deal with a criminal (thief perhaps?). It turned out that the thief was 1/2, and he used disguises such as 3/6 or 4/8 to avoid being caught.
(Actually I found this on YouTube, it's called The Weird Number and it is a part of a series called Exploring Mathematics created by Xerox, would you believe it. I was close, it was a village of Integers and the thief was 2/3)
……….
Another show I used to watch on TV as a child featured a police detective that used math to solve crimes, always committed by the archvillain Dr. No. There were only a few episodes, with subjects such as prime numbers, polyomino combinatorics and Eulerian paths (drawing without lifting the pen, a link to the episode in Hebrew). They even published a companion workbook to the series which I bought and filled in. I probably still have it somewhere.
………
I had a board game that was centered on the concept of sets. The board was divided into regions corresponding to subsets of a set of 3 or 4 elements (e.g. {1,2}, {1,3}, {2}, {1,2,3}, etc.) and you moved or placed pieces according to... something... perhaps related to unions or intersections? I don't remember and the whole idea seems unbelievable. I couldn't find people to play with me, understandable, and I moved on. However, the important thing was that the game came with a rather thick workbook. I don't remember much about what was in it, I think a lot of it was material that was not related to the game at all. I do remember working hard on the exercises and trying to understand.
………
As a child I took some tests and was identified as gifted, for a year or two I participated in after school classes on various subjects. I remember very little from this experience, it was a long bus ride once or twice a week, I didn't like it enough to continue going. One thing I remember is a young lecturer trying to explain symmetries of a triangle and permutations on the 3 vertices.
………
Around 8th grade I remember being given a set of books about basic Euclidean geometry from school. I think it was more advanced than the usual school material, and definitely written in a more serious tone than my usual books. I suppose it was some experimental educational program. I have no idea if other children in my class also got this material, I have no recollection of talking to other children about this, nor talking to the teacher. Did someone follow my progress, was there a schedule, I don't know. I do recall vividly working hard on these books, practicing ruler and compass constructions and proving triangle congruences. I worked alone for hours and wouldn't stop until I completed a chapter and all its exercises.
………
In grades 8-9 I would sometimes have free periods in school, and I liked spending them in the school library. Besides reading science fiction books and magazines I liked finding textbooks that were not used in class. I remember a book about the basic concepts of topology: open and closed sets in the plane, unions and intersections of open and closed sets, propopsitions and proofs, etc. Must have been another experimental program, I seriously doubt this was ever used in a normal class. The book tried to prove the Brouwer fixed point theorem for a circle in the plane, I don't think I understood this material completely at the time.
………
Growing up in the 1980's I witnessed and pariticipated in the personal computing revolution. My father would sometimes use the university mainframe, and I got to see this monster in its large room. You could feed it with boxes of punched cards containing your Fortran program, and then get an output on continuous paper and find out you had a bug somewhere... Then various personal computers became available. My first one was a Sinclair ZX81, with 1K RAM. This was quickly replaced by a ZX Spectrum with an extension to 48K RAM. I had to learn BASIC and I started to write simple programs. I got to know more about how computers work, using simple peripheral hardware such as a display (an old black and white TV) and an external disk (cassettes and a cassette player). Some of my friends had other computer models, such as the Commodore 64, Dragon 32, TI-99 and Apple IIe. Eventually we all used these computers to play games, much as is done today. It didn't turn me into a real programmer, but I definitely learned the fundamentals and made my first steps in understanding and solving computational problems.
………
When I was in high school my older brother started to think about university. He wanted to study computer science, and back then it was still a part of the math department. The first year material was mostly calculus and linear algebra. When he wasn't around I would read his textbooks. This was my first encounter with real mathematics subjects, written for grownups and not trying to avoid the hard issues. I couldn't really understand and follow the material by myself. I did see the contrast between these textbooks and the simplified versions I was taught at school. Mathematics was much more than just number manipulation, speed and distance problems, using a formula to find a derivative, or trigonometric identities.
