FRACTURE

I never understood mathematics—I used to memorize every line from the book that was included in the exam. Even though I knew basic addition and subtraction, I never truly realized why I was doing them differently in each specific problem.

I once asked my mother what a “meter” was. At the time, I was memorizing unit conversions. My mother could only tell me that it was a unit and that it equaled one hundred centimeters. But I could never make her understand that I wasn’t actually asking for a conversion. I asked her again and again, and finally, she slapped me.

Mathematics, out of the blue, became my most favorite subject from 9th grade. I can never explain to you, or even to myself, how I could grasp the hidden logic behind most of the equations I was executing—which had once been impossible for me to understand before.

I’m not saying that I’m pretty smart in math—no, I’m definitely not. I admit I’m not even close to being good at math. But the realization of how I started to uncover the truths of mathematics all by myself all of a sudden, genuinely struck me in the head.