Welcome to It’s All Math
I’m excited for this blog and show! I’ve been putting it off for a while, but I recently had a class about writing and logic that made me realize I love writing more than I thought. I am trying to strike a conversation tone with the blog. I want to introduce the beautiful world of math, statistics, and R to a broader audience.
I have a BS in Math and Statistics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I like to think of an undergrad degree as learning the last bit of basic math knowledge we need to understand the formal side of math. The disconnect between what many freshman students (and regular people) think math is, and what mathematicians believe math is makes for fun conversation.
Before we get too far into that I’d like to talk about my history with math, and what made me want to get a degree in it. All throughout my school career I was fairly good at math, statistics, and sciences. The first time I told my parents I wanted to major in math. “What the hell kind of job can you do with that,” was the first question that popped out of my dad’s mouth. In 2008 when I started school I didn’t really have an answer, and for the most part the tech sector was pretty niche. I quickly realized that I wasn’t taking school seriously and decided to drop out. I worked a series of dead-end jobs before I decided I needed to do something to get out of the endless cycle of near poverty I was living.
I sat down and listed out all the things I’m interested in and started to some self study projects to see how much I liked it, and when I hit doing some algebra 2 and pre-calc realized that I liked math more than I remembered. I started with reteaching myself high school math with Khan Academy on my breaks at work and at home. After a year I had finished all the high school math that Khan had and decided to re-apply at UAF as a math major. I crushed the placement test and it was off to the races.
During my underground I found out that math is probably the most widely applicable field outside of maybe philosophy. The first year of school was the hardest as I was older than most of my classmates. I had to really work hard to prove that I belonged there. Fast forward to my senior year and my adviser said that I should be proud of myself, and that I was an inspiration to what someone can do with a little hard work and self-motivation. Now I’m on the job hunt, and excited to tell you why you should consider studying math, even if it’s self paced study.
So I’m glad you are here, and I hope you are excited to learn about math, its history, present, and future. Look forward to learning about why we use Hindu-Arabic numerals, what the hell is knot theory, is there an end to math. There will be a podcast/radio show with interviews with the folks working in all the fun niche fields that modern mathematics has to offer