From the Editor’s Desk: Math ⭐

By the time I got to high school, I knew what I liked and I paid little attention to what I didn’t. This didn’t go well for me academically. And it is somewhat ironic that two of the topics I didn’t care about much at all would come back to haunt me later in life.

The first was Spanish, which I took all four years of high school while barely paying attention and barely passing. When you consider that we later bought an apartment in Mexico City and spend half our time there now, you can see the irony. My calcified brain is barely capable of learning anything now, and I’d love to get that wasted time in high school back.

The second is math. And here, I mean math in all its forms. I did so badly across a few algebra classes in what was then called junior high school that I ended up retaking and barely passing algebra in high school. And then my high school offered its first-ever computer programming classes when I was a junior. And because those classes were considered math, I never moved on to higher level math classes like pre-calc and calculus like most of the other students. I could barely handle chemistry, and physics was beyond me.

The only math class I did well in during that phase of my schooling was geometry. In that class, I got all A’s, confusing my parents and teachers alike. But that’s because I was an artist, and to me, geometry was all about drawing, and so I actually paid attention. But don’t worry, there’s irony in that, too: I went from high school to an art school for college, but only for one year because I suddenly realized that was a path to never having a good career. So I was checked out by the second semester, mentally, and I dropped out of that school after the first year.

A series of re-do attempts followed at various schools, mostly part-time. But in 1993, my wife and I moved to the Phoenix area so I could go back to college, this time for computer science. I was going to become a programmer, a career I maybe should have considered in high school, given how much the topic interested me then. I had taught myself programming over many years, many computer platforms (starting with the Intellivision and its Entertainment Computer System add-on, but then the Commodore 64/128, Apple IIGS, and Amiga), and various programming languages (BASIC, of course, but also Pascal and C). And when I went back to school to study this formally, I of course moved to the PC, where I started off with Turbo Pascal before moving on to C, C++, and then Visual Basic and more.

This was when I met Gary Brent, a professor and programmer who jumpstarted my writing career. I’ve told these stories before, so here I’ll just say that Gary was possibly the smartest person I’ve ever met. And yet he, like me, was actually pretty terrible at math. So I was surprised one day when he complimented me on my ability to calculate restaurant tips in my head.

I dismissed this compliment by telling him that I was cheating because I wasn’t doing...