So once Andrew Tai (Hope that’s how to spell his last name) passed by Berkeley, and because of his strange “never eat alone when you can grab a friend” policy, he drag me out to eat dinner with him and talk about stuffs.  And he mentioned how in school he just can’t do math right.

So that got me thinking, a lot of times people just say “Wow Eric you’re so smart you can do math,” and that seems to end the conversation.  I don’t like that, because it’s like un-scientific.  It’s like someone asking you “Why is the sky blue?” and you just answer “Oh because the sky is blue.”  You simply give the phenomenon a work rather than figure out the reason.

I don’t know about other people, but this is how I look at math or any other subject.  When I was young, my mom has lots of story books, and I like reading story books, to the point where if I see paper with words on it I’ll grab it and read every single word (so if I buy a can of drink I’ll stare at all the health info and stuffs and try to read it).  So when I started going to school, I read those textbooks like story books too.

Well, but you said, text books consists of boring facts and formulas that you could care less about, how can it be as interesting as story books?  Well, so I kind of subconsciously make up stories about subjects when I study them.  See, in a way, the sentence “Oh no! The wolf ate all the little sheep! How is mama sheep going to save them?” incite the same amount of curiosity as the sentence “Oh no! Bob needs to multiply two numbers but he only knows how to add!  How can he do it?”, as long as you believe the answer to both will make you satisfied.

So as I grow older and older, the story becomes more and more complete, and as the result you want to learn more and more.  It’s not when you started reading the Lord of the Rings you will not want to stop.  In fact, I basically see subjects as RPG games.  See, multiplication might looks cool, but not until you know about long division, just like when you find new equipments in a RPG you’re like “YES!! I don’t have to walk all the way back to town to heal anymore.”  And basically doing problem sets is just the same as fighting monsters and leveling up, except more exciting if you are working on problems you never seen before.

So this perspective gives me two advantages.  One, it gives me incentive to learn new things, and two, it makes me remember things better.  Because somehow, if you’re just remember equations like random strings of text it’s hard, but in context of something you like it’ll be easier.  So if you ask me some question like “What does compactness mean?”, instead of trying to recall the official definition cited in textbooks, in my mind I’m thinking “Once upon a time there’s a math professor…”.  In fact, this is why I manage to memorized the whole moonlight sonata (For those of you who didn’t know, because when I get nervous I have very narrow vision, so I can never play piano and reading the thing at the same time, so I always memorize it all), I somehow imagine the different notes as being friends and depending on the sounds sometimes they’re happy or other times they’re fighting with each other, etc.

Anyways, so that’s kind of how I think of things.  Hope it’s interesting.