Mathematics of Love & Hate: My Unfolding Voyage 34

My encounters with Mathematics has all through been a relationship of love and hate. It was similar to my relationship with football. Football was all excitement about dribbling past opponent defenders, accepting passes and forwarding passes to potential scorers in advantageous position, about kicking or placing the ball into the nets of the opposition and about snatching balls away from the feet of the opposition players. But it was equally painful that would make one hate football: the bruises from the falls, the gasping for breadth after repeated runs down the flanks or the middle, the pains from the pulled muscles, the loss of heart from missed scoring chances or waste of sitters. Mathematics was like that. You solve problems to score wins and get the scores in examinations, you enjoy the thrill of newer concepts and their applications, the speed with which one solves the problems: you love them. But there are those silly mistakes and the concepts that are dull and abstract and laborious to deal with. You hate them.
Simple or advanced mathematics had both. Continuous introduction to newer concepts that are exciting and the work that was boring.. Form the use of operators of + , - , x , divisions, the three brackets and of to the dull additions involving counting as if one were a calculating machine in the sales desk and the memorizing of tables, from application of unitary system and fractions and decimals to using non-decimal systems of measurements of values, weights, areas and volumes (the use of Milli, centi, deci, deca, heca, kilo for liters, meters, and 100 paise to a Rupee came only when we are midway in the secondary school but the measurement of time still remained in units of 60, 60, 24, 7, 364 and 365 while the angles are still measured in units of fraction of 360 degrees: I do not know why they never think of introducing decimal metric system of 100 seconds a minute, 100 minutes an hour, 20 hours a day by adjusting the downwards the time counted as second, 20 hours a day, 10, 35 days a month and 10 months a year with adjustments made every fifth year as a leap year. while making the circle made of 100 degrees making 25 degrees of a bigger size than now as right angle). Then there was interesting concepts of decimals but the recurring decimal was a sore, the LCM and GCF ere boring but useful to a certain extent, the concept of number line with zero in the middle was so simple but mind boggling. The application of interest and compound interest was interesting as was the profit-loss sharing on capital invested, but why ask so much of multiplication of compounding interest for 5 years with half-yearly rest involving boring multiplications and additions until you learn logarithms at the higher secondary stage. Geometry involved boring drawings of interesting regular shapes of curves and areas. But unnecessary exercises with equilateral triangles and right angled triangles, Solid geometry further complicated things with repeated use of pi and radius though measuring volumes was interesting but conic sections were best left to those design engineers who would use them.
Trigonometry was fascinating and made you dream that you could calculate the height of mountains you would never be able to climb to their peaks. Algebra became increasingly interesting removing the need for arithmetic, the interesting formula that need to memorized but can be derived from first principle even if one forgets them unlike the complicated trigonometry formula that would take more time to derive from first principles.

Surd's in algebra was fine up to a point, so was factorization. Permutations and combinations opened the gates to imagination as did the solving of simultaneous equations. Coordinate geometry opened up another vistas of imagination, though became complicate as you started learning about hyperbolas, their axes and asymptotes.

I loved something and enjoyed, for some things I had to labor hard and yet cannot master them developing hate. Yet, I needed to score. From class X onwards, I had to learn every part of mathematics myself from the books and the class hours of teachers' instruction at the school. Despite my weaknesses in a number of areas of mathematics, I could maintain high scores at the school. In Class XI, there were two papers in Mathematics : one completely dealing with Algebra while the other covered all sorts of metrics - coordinate geometry, solid geometry and trigonometry. The last examination that I had appeared for in the school on the first paper was an eye opener for me. There were no more classes after the examination. After enjoying few days of leisure and games, I went to the school one afternoon to know the scores of any of the papers that the teachers might have evaluated. A few papers have been evaluated and the teachers told me the scores I secured. The mathematics teacher who was to evaluate the paper on Algebra greeted me well and told me sit down beside him along with some other students because he would start evaluating our papers in front of us. He searched out my paper and started evaluation. I was getting all correct - no mistakes in the sums I had solved page after page. The teacher was as excited as I were. He raced down to the last page and was thrilled that I got all sums right. He was convinced that I got the full marks: 100 out of 100. Then he started adding up the numbers in case if I had missed doing any sum I was supposed to do as a cross check. He added up and we were proceeding towards 100 but at the end it totaled up to 114 or so!. The he started checking with the question paper to find out which sum I have done in excess because the question paper gave options at various places: so you could chose to do one particular sum as an alternative to another one. By cross checking he found that I had indeed done more sums than were required, but I had missed doing a sum - a small one carrying two marks given the choices I had made. So ultimately he gave me 98, the highest in that paper in the school, This incident had told me that keep attempting all the sums in examinations if you were fast enough: you might get the best of the marks out of the alternatives that you would attempt given that you might get a few some wrong somewhere. It was a lesson that I would apply in future. But for the present the teacher was extremely happy with my performance, notwithstanding missing 2 marks. But I was unhappy that yet another time I had missed the opportunity of a perfect score by not being careful about choices of questions and getting carried away by the sums that I could solve easily and not rechecking the answer script before submission if I had any omission.
Classes for higher secondary had got over and now we were to prepare over the next two months at home before we appear for the Final Higher Secondary Board Examinations. The School Principal met my father and advised hum to arrange for special coaching to guide me for the final examinations. My father asked what I would like him to do. I was not inclined to give time for coaching. So, I had to tell him that I would manage myself. He still insisted. Then we settled for mathematics coaching for an hour a day twice a week for the two months so that I can sort out some problems that I might have not been able to manage. I did not want my father to spend further money for my studies at this stage and wanted all that I succeed in scoring in the Final Examination as my own credit or debit.

I knew if I had a Guru it would have helped but I did not know who could have been an ideal guru/ teacher to coach me. I preferred to depend on my own efforts, capabilities and luck. But I knew that I had keeping weaknesses in my mathematics unattended to.