I am an urban, white, female math major with an anxiety disorder and a borderline offensive sense of humor. As further summary: when filling out college applications and needing three words that people would use to describe me, I polled a bunch of friends and there were two words that almost everyone listed: energetic and scary. So, that gives you an idea of the sort of person I am.
In middle and high school, I was president and captain of the respective trivia teams. I was in a math/science accelerated program because, let's face it, Baltimore City isn't known for its stellar public education. Yet, for some reason, people would get surprised when I told them I was going to major in math.
Clearly, the simple biological fact that causes me to wear a bra makes it improbable that I would enjoy proving theorems and solving systems of linear equations when I was bored in class. Or maybe it was because I was obnoxiously social and a bit off-the-wall that people assumed I wouldn't go into something as "stationary" as mathematics,
which shows just how much people actually know about academia. Ask any one of us at Hopkins: nothing stays still in the world of academia. We're just scrambling to keep up.
Sometimes when I'm out with my mom, she'll point out some items in the store or a receipt at a restaurant and ask, "What's the total with tax/tip?" And I jokingly tell her that I'm not in applied math. But really, that's like being with a biologist and asking, "What animal is that?" or a history major and, "What time period is this from?" We might know the answer, but chances are that we'll stare blankly.
Then my mom jokes, "Fifty thousand dollars a year, and you can't do simple arithmetic," at which point I want to show her an actual research publication and see if she could read the first page without asking what all the curly brackets meant.
I don't see numbers anymore. Zero is trivial, and one appears in induction: "Prove true for one. Assume true for n, and prove true for n+1." Ta-da! This is a slight exaggeration, but just because I have learned the names of random theorems doesn't mean I can automatically look at a bill, calculate tax and tip and then divide it fairly for everyone at the table. I make comments about not being in applied math, but even those I know who are in the math department in the Engineering school aren't walking-talking calculators — though they do like to talk.
This is the world of a pure math major:
At least fifteen hours a week of homework per math class, most of which is staring at a piece of paper, waiting for the answer to punch you in the face. Sitting in lecture and zoning out for a second, only to come back and see another two-thirds of the chalkboard filled with who-knows-what. Spending the entire TA section asking questions about what symbols mean. And this is just strictly-required class time.
You know how if you play too many videos games or Tetris or jigsaw puzzles and when you blink, you can see them? After a geometry class last semester, I saw the entire Greek alphabet wrapped up in cosines and sines and square roots.
There's no way that this is unique to math. My computer science friends breathe codes. My neuroscience friends draw brains and label them in their sleep. My international relations friends get to learn all about the politics between the United States and Iran (fun fact about my previous education: for the longest time, I thought the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico).
Not everyone in CS can spit out Python at will, nor everyone in neuroscience can perform a lobotomy (thank goodness), and I would place good money that IR people aren't fluent in UN politics yet. So don't look at me and say, "Aren't you supposed to be good with numbers?" We all have our different natural skills, and then there are the ones we have to learn. I love pure and abstract mathematics; I'll be spending my whole life trying to figure out how to connect it with the world around me.
