An Incoherent Treatise on the Mind of a Mathematician

I'm Osamu Miyazaki and there are alot of people like me in this class, in many different ways. Many of them are distracting themselves in any manner of ways to simply not look at that menacing and all encompassing whiteboard. Some are having full conversations, talking about many different things about looking forward to lunch or laying out their plans to buy the latest game on their way home. I hear a lot of things here and there. I can’t really help but listen.

I also witness what happens around me as well. There’s always Junpei Hamada who can be reliably seen falling in and out of sleep throughout the day. People say that he works after school and stays up late playing video games. Though I’d think that he sleeps to ignore participation. He does score remarkably higher than average when it comes to exams, suggesting my hunch right. But his best friend, Takashi Yamamoto, does go out of his way to break his listlessness. Which admittedly, makes for interesting moments.

In the end, I don’t mind any of this behavior. If I had a friend to interact with during our math period, I’d likely do something similar. It would be a lot better than being lost in thought while staring at my notebook. I’d like to make it clear though, I do have friends. Saying it of course makes me sound like the type of person without friends, so I stay away from making such statements. But I’d like to think that I’m generally outgoing.

The friends I do have in class are as remote as anyone in a classroom can be, so I distract myself without using social interaction. The alternative in question is a blue notebook placed immutably yet fervently at my desk. If someone took a glance at my notebook—not like I’d want to show anyone nor would I be distressed to have someone look at its contents—they’d probably start seeing the signs of distress emitting from their face. Then promptly return to their desk, with a hollowed and pale expression.

If you think that’s an overreaction, believe me, it has happened before and I’d like to prevent it from happening again. People do sneak glances every now and then, being slightly mesmerized by how someone could have such determination to secure their head from their notebook. So I try to limit myself from standing out too much within the sea of monotony.

From the way that I go about spending my time, it can probably be a surprise that I am academically motivated. The apathy I display in not wanting to engage during class is not because I don’t nor want to understand the subject. The truth being that most of the math taught to me is repetition from what I’ve learned from countless textbooks I’ve picked up over the years.

My passion for math extends deep into childhood. It’s a period of time that I don’t remember well, but my mother seems to remember well on my behalf. While other kids would be brought to the playground on weekends, playing tag or hide-and-seek, I would play in the dirt. Or more accurately I would play with dirt. According to her, I would break a branch from the few trees that surrounded the playground and start by giving myself geometry problems to mark into the dirt and work them out.

I can’t say that I really remember much of what happened in my childhood, as it all seems like a blur at this point, but that does sound strange enough to be something I’d do. I don’t really find any desire to press her for further stories about my childhood, but the few stories she has told me about my math-wired brain have been absurd even for someone like myself.

There are few things that I do remember by myself however. I remember carrying a large textbook with me whenever we left our house, reading it when I had even a few seconds of free time. Every place that could give me time to read is where you’d find a child as tall as a bike intensely staring at a page of geometry problems and proofs. This tendency did cause a few problems.

My mother would drag my hand while we were walking to make sure I wasn’t being left behind. As a precaution from standing in the middle of the street for several minutes immersed in the textbook. Admittedly, this kind of thing did happen multiple times and likely became a reflex for my mother. Frankly, the times I could’ve been runned over is perhaps a little too much for anyone without a death wish.

“Miyazaki.”

Maybe that’s as good of an explanation as to how a mathematician is created. If I’m being honest, I don’t really remember the reason why I pursued math so eccentrically. It’s something I’ve been trying to figure out with the times I’ve asked my mother about my strange habits and with every geometry problem that I write. I hope I get closer to closing the distance between myself and my answer. I don’t feel as if I’m going anywhere with that. Regardless… I still continue to try to this very day—

“Miyazaki, are you listening?”

Suddenly, my stream of thought broke. I was left a little petrified by the looks people directed towards me. Some people chuckled under their breath, with some snarking whether I’d be able to answer based on my sudden shock.

“Now that I have your attention, can you tell me what the next step is to solve the following inequality?”

He said in a stern tone, while maintaining a look of worry for the sudden return to reality he had me. I took a glance at the problem on the board: a triangle, with two known angles and 1 known side length. The other length was unknown and with this I recognized I needed to use the law of sines.

“To solve for the unknown side, you must make two ratios between the sine of an angle and the opposite side. Once you have those, you set them equal to each other and solve for the side length algebraically, Mr. Yamamura.”

“Huh… Glad to see you know what you’re doing, but please pay a little more attention to the front of the classroom instead of your notebook.”

He looked relieved. I must’ve guessed that he probably told others the same questions but was met with a lack of response of statements declaring they knew nothing.

He said all of that in a voice that was insisting that despite being well-learned I should at least pay attention for his sake—to at least give the illusion that I was actively participating. But he meant it in the most chalant way possible that a teacher could possibly ask a student for a personal favor.

“Now, let’s go ahead with how Miyazaki described our next step, so we must—”

Even with those niceties, I declined to act on them. I returned back to the geometry problem that’s plagued me since I found it late yesterday. Though, I’m probably going to throw in the towel—as much as it pains me. Hearing my notebook audibly close brings me a little relief, but now I’m sitting in a state of elusiveness.

“Now… what to do?” I murmured to myself.

“I guess… I’ll just think. What else can I really do that won’t be disingenuous?”

In the end, I don't think having this level of self-realization about how I act towards math and brushing it off to be that off-putting. I don’t really regret getting to this point either. It’s good to have time to really just sit down and stay silent for a while, right?