Four Loves Math!

I realize that One has already posted on this subject, but I thought I'd compose my post before reading her conjectures.  (Fun, by the way- I may predict others sometime in the future, too!)

One of my favorite movie quotes is, "Other than numbers, she's all I think about."  This happens after the main character is told to give up on a girl.  I can relate, although there are many, many things I may obsess about from time to time - certain song, how rude a co-worker was, a guy, etc etc... - trust me, the part of my brain that thinks about numbers is always going.  I realize that numbers and math are different.  I like numbers better than math.  Of course math is awesome.  While in school, math came very easy to me.  Although I don't think that I pondered too much the reason why, I think that I've come up with an answer.

Math and my brain use similar language/processes.  Hmmm...  I'm not sure that really communicates what I'm trying to say, so I'll explain better.  My brain constantly tries to figure out what happened and why.  Whether it's about why a person reacted a certain way, or why something fell and landed a certain way, or what that noise was.  One, I hope this doesn't stress you out, but my brain is kind of putting things in order constantly seeking to know what made that things happen how they happened and why.  Often something will kind of confuse and later I'll hear the clue that makes it all make sense.  Those are little victories for my brain.  All that to say, math is all about finding solutions to problems, figuring out why things work a specific way, so my brain already does that, so math has always just clicked for me.

I enjoy math, it almost always follows a pattern, or at least there's a reason for the way things work out.  That makes it way easier than all of the little "problems" that my brain constantly tries to make sense of.  Sometimes if I have spare time, I'll figure out squares and cubes and higher exponents to try to make an equation to represent how they relate.  Or other fun little math exercises.  I often when seeing a number figure out whether or not it's divisible by three, six or nine or 11 or 37.  Mostly  it's just subconscious these days, it's just part of the background conversation that my brain has with itself.  So I love math, it's a mental breath of fresh air.