Digits and equations

 

 

Courtesy: Rubik’s_cube.svg‎

During my school days, mathematics was the subject of my interest. I don’t claim that I was a wiz in maths, but I certainly was better than the guys who didn’t know the difference between differentiation and integration (Many students learn this part by rote, come up with the correct solution, but don’t know what it is all about). I used to carry a problem book, in which I’d note down all interesting problems and their solutions. I was enthusiastic about arriving the same result by following different methods.

My habit of playing with numbers earned me the title- GENIUS. In fact, I’m not a genius at all, but see how I create that impression. After the first period, one guy arrives at me with a very complicated looking problem. I look into the problem, study it for 5 minutes, look up the formulae for another 5 minutes and finally put it in my brains and solve it out in next ten minutes. The whole process takes about 20 minutes, and you can see that I am no genius.

Look the same problem from the guy’s perspective. He gives me the problem, waits for two minutes or so, gets impatient and leaves the classroom to hang out with other guys. When he comes back, he sees me engaged in some other work. He asks me if I have done the problem, and I say ,”Oh that was a piece of cake..”. He thinks that he didn’t arrive in time to see me finishing the problem.

After a few hours, another girl would come to me with the same problem. Now that I had practiced the problem once, I’d do it in a flick of the second. When the next guy comes, I tell him the answer even without reading the question. Soon, all of my classmates get convinced that I am a ‘supergenius’.

If any of my schoolmates are reading this, I swear, this is what happened. I’m not as smart as you think (if I were smart I wouldn’t have posted this article in my blog at the first place).

I don’t study maths any more. But Mathematics has made my thoughts logical, beliefs concrete and decisions fearless.