My love for violin

My first true love? This is one of the hardest question to answer. I think my first true love was my violin. When I was in middle school, My dad gave me a nice violin as a gift. That is when I started to play violin. But violin is not my first instrument. My mom always wanted me to pick an instrument and master it. But I never could fall in love with a particular instrument. I always lost my interest. When I was five, I started learning piano but I had a short and fat finger. As a result, playing violin was physically demanding for me. Soon I lost interest in piano and quit at the age of nine. If I continued playing piano to this day; I would have become a prodigy. When I was 10 years old, I started to learn classic guitar. My dad told me a men who can play a classic guitar can woe lots of woman. I thought it was good choice to play classical guitar but I soon lost the passion for playing guitar. I wanted to stop playing guitar and focus on my study. However, Music never gave up on me. Music led me to an instrument called violin. It was four string instrument played with a bow. When I just started playing, my violin sounded terrible it made squeaky noise. It was extremely difficult to produce beautiful sound with correct pitch. When I was learning violin, I was living under a guardian. My guardian hated the sound of my instrument and made me practice at dusty and dark garage. First, I thought violin was not right for me but I did not quit on violin. I loved the sound produced by my violin teacher and I wanted to have the same sound. I fell in love with violin when I had my fist recital. At the recital, I felt so confident and powerful. I knew I had the talent and passion to master the instrument I did not quit on my violin since then and I am still struggling to master the instrument.

Yes. I am a math nerd.

The passage below is from the book called Fermat's last theorem by Amir Aczel. The book tells the story about how mathematicians finally proved a mathematical statement from Fermat. This book gives a brief history of mathematics and introduced famous mathematicians who created algebra, geometry, and calculus. I admire how Aczel make sure to break down sophisticated topic to the reader so that non mathematician can understand and enjoy reading this book. In this book, Aczel uses an interesting tactic to keep the reader interested. He starts the book by giving us the trailer for this book and he explain the conclusion. He dedicates rest of his book to show us the process of getting to the right answer. The main purpose of this book is to show how many branches of mathematics can work together to prove a theorem. I love the passage below because I could easily understand the author and I could see inside the gifted mathematician's to approach a problem. After reading this passage, I was encourage to solve mathematical question with more efficient method. This served as a excellent anecdote for me to remember the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.


Here is the passage:
One day, the teacher punished young Gauss by telling him to stay in the class room until he add up all the number from 1 to 100 while every went to play outside. Two minutes later, 10 years old Gauss was outside playing with the rest of the class. The teacher came out furious. "Carl Friedrich!" the teacher called, "do you want more severe punishment? I told you to stay inside until you finish adding up all the numbers!" "But I have," he said, "here is the answer." Gauss handed the teacher a piece of paper with the right answer, 5,050, written on it. Apparently, Gauss figured out that he could write two rows of 101 numbers:
0 1 2 3 ..... 97 98 99 100
100 99 98 97..... 3 2 1 0
He noted that sum of each column was 100, so there was nothing long to add up. since there was 101 columns, the sum of all numbers was 101 x 100 = 10,100. Now, either of the two rows had the sum he needed only one of the two rows the answer was half of 10,000, or 5,050. Very simple, he thought. The teacher, however, learn a lesson and never again assigned the young Gauss a math problem for punishmen.

Aczel, Amir D. "Gauss." Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem. New York, NY: Dell Pub., 1997. 51-52. Print.

Homcoming

It was a typically busy, frustrating, and tiring day for me at school. I got the math test back from Mr.Simmonds and I did not do well on the test; I got a C- and I was really depressed that night. During that night, I experienced an unrealistic dream. The dream started at school. Everything was new, exciting, and unreal. The story became more personal; I had a beautiful girlfriend. she was perfect, exceptionally pretty. She loved music, sports, and science. My girlfriend and I had a great time hanging out in not one class but all of them because we had all the class together which was awesome! After school we hung out around campus and we drove back to her house. When I awoke, I tried so hard to sleep to see her again but I couldn't. I couldn't wait to fall a sleep again but once back in the dream something was different: some of my old friends from Athens Academy were there too. This did not bother me until I walk into the my real girlfriend . I was terrified. I tried my best to avoid both of my girlfriends because I did not want any conflict. I avoided them by hang out with my best friend, David Cason. I couldn't handle both them being in the same dream. This only gets worse. Now, it was their homecoming week. Each of them expected I was going to the dance with them. That is not all, some random girl asked me to homecoming and for some unexplainable reason I said "yes". I couldn't believe myself. I swear I am not a jerk but i couldn't myself. I had to make a choice between three girls now and on top of that I had to break two of their heart. How could anybody pull this off? My dream became foggy. It was hard to tell what was happening but I remember I had to apologize to all three of them and then afterwards to their parents. After all chaos chaos my alarm went off. If only it had rung sooner...