6

Never the Twain Sha l Meet l

It Takes an Adult
There are some pleasures that even three-year-olds can enjoy, such as ice
cream and warm sunshine on your face on a nice spring day—but there
are some pleasures that are reserved for adults. Intelligent conversation.
Vegetables. Geometry.
Believe me, I didn’t wake up at age eighteen and say, “Math looks inter-
esting—maybe I should major in it.” I liked math ever since we first
started counting things back in kindergarten, or even before. Well, I liked
math until I hit geometry, and then there was a miserable year when
I struggled to get Bs because I kept not seeing how to prove some things
and skipping steps in things I could see how to prove. Advanced alge-
bra and trig rekindled my enthusiasm, and when I got to analytic geom-
etry and calculus I was back on the math track—partially because these
two subjects almost completely eliminate the necessity for knowing any-
thing but basic stuff in geometry.
I can’t remember what bothered me most about geometry, but I do re-
member that indirect proofs were near the top of the list. An indirect