Nerdism personified

It is strange that the older I get the geekier I become. I mean, I was actually excited yesterday when I heard that they found a new largest prime number, which is incredibly important if…ok, to be honest knowing that a number that is millions of digits long is prime really has no practical application outside of really obscure cryptography purposes but, hey, it’s another prime number. And they still have to test it by doing things like “can we divide it by 3? Well, how about five? Seven, then? Damn, this might take a while….”


I do find now that though I am not as fast with math as I used to be (and way too reliant on spreadsheets for my own good) I probably understand and appreciate the ideas behind all of the high level math that I was taught. I’ve joked with people that I reached the level in college courses where numbers no longer existed and all you were dealing with were greek letters and neverending discussions about the imaginary portion of the equation. This is actually true. I still deal with imaginary portions of equations to this very day and for the life of me I cannot explain it. The square root of negative one is i, or maybe j, but it exists. You just accept that it does.

I bring this up because it just shows how a school subject changes as you get older. As a kid math was a competition to the point that a) I made state in the Illinois math competition my senior year of high school, b) said state math competition had an official song, c) I have heard people referred to as mathletes without a sense of irony and d) math competitions have marked the only time in my life where I could look around and realize that I am the coolest guy in the room. Then in college and starting work math became my tool. I’ve mentioned many times that I really only have two skills and being good at math is one of them. Being able to spin numbers around and make sense of them has built a career for me. But it really was just a tool that was just a step above a parlor trick. Now I actually enjoy thinking about how numbers work and thinking about the paradoxes around infinity and how some infinities are larger than others even though they are all still infinite. I don’t understand everything and I am much too old to develop any great theorems but I really enjoy reading up on the theories.

God, I’m such a nerd.