I want to try and move on from posting about my health for a while and return to topics that are a bit more cheerful.
I have always been fascinated by numbers and patterns. I can pick out a pattern very quickly and can get very OCD if a perceived pattern is disturbed. I loved mathematics at school and always excelled at the subject. Initially I studied both mathematics and further mathematics at A level but was forced to drop the latter due to the impact of my depression. I think if I’d continued it would have been a tough decision between mathematics and biology as to what to study at university.
Since leaving school I have done several online university level courses in mathematics just for fun. I have been rather neglectful of late but fully intend to get back to it. If I win the lottery I may even do an Open University degree in the subject.
I used to have an obsession with the number 3 after discovering that if the sum of the digits in a number are a multiple of 3 then the whole number is divisible by 3. I used to use a digital clock and the time as starting points to perform calculations involving the number 3 and I would challenge myself to do them before the clock changed. I also used to calculate powers of 3 in my head to ridiculous numbers. Thankfully I managed to stop these activities as they used to prevent me from sleeping.
I also had a fascination with the number pi after finding that the formula for pi was as follows:
I decided to calculate this infinite series by hand to see if I could establish pi myself to set number of decimal points (I can’t remember how many). I spent an entire morning with a calculator and pad of paper. In the end I wrote a computer program to see just how many calculations I would have to do to achieve my aim. I worked out that if I did one calculation every 10 seconds it would have have taken me 212 years. Needless to say I gave up.
I think the reason I love numbers is that they are objective; there is a definite right and wrong and they’re the same everywhere regardless of where you are in the universe. In a world where I often struggle to make sense of things, mathematics is a constant friend.
My Faulty Brain 