December 18, 2024 in life4 minutes
In this blog post, I will write about my past life as a math student, and how my perspective changed about pure math throughout these years.
Disclaimer
I am by no means a math researcher now, or never one (although probably close to being one), so there might be biases in how my words represents the math world, so please take everything in this article with a grain of salt.
However, I hope that through my struggles and some of the general lessons I learned, this article could serve as a source of inspiration or ideas for people that are walking along a similar career path as me.
Work In Progress
I was fortunate enough to encounter many good teachers when growing up, that enabled me to discover to joy of math. In my younger days - probably before high school, I enjoyed math, for the satisfication and self-confidence gained from problem solving. Starting from high school, through self-studying, I found the beauty of abstract mathematical theories.
It is hard to concisely describe the beauty of math in a few words, but roughly speaking, it is a mixture of:
From this list, I hope that you have been convinced that I am fervent lover of math. I wanted to do math as a living before entering college, but I had concerns -
I ended up making the best use of my college entrance exams scores, and enrolled in NTU as a student majoring in mechanical engineering. Eventually, I became unhappy - I can’t stand the lack of rigor of many academic subjects, I suck at making things in workshop and was often scolded for not remembering many safety instructions. In one semester, I went to take classes in the math department, and I successfully transfered at the start of my sophomore year.
It was one of my happiest moments in my life, as the transfer process wasn’t easy. I made up my mind to completely isolate myself in the world of math, disengaging in any meaningless social interactions, and dedicate every time and energy to learning math, to get exceptional in at least one field.
It was like living in a dream, where I constructed a character named “self”, with clear definitions of who this “self” is, what this “self” likes, and what kind of person this “self” eventually wanted to become.
To name a few of my lifetime favorite classic textbook authors: John Milnor, Jean-Pierre Serre, Walter Rudin, Tom M. Apostol, Hideyuki Matsumura, Michael Atiyah, William Fulton, Peter May, Robin Hartshorne, Tom Leinster, James Humphreys. ↩︎