Mathematics! How I dreaded the subject in those days whenever my mind drifted towards it as a kid. I am more intimidated by it now as an adult, even in the careless whisper of its awesomeness and in the seemingly boring, tedious, uncompromising logical steps it usually takes to get up or down to a Q.E.D! I probably rank that doggone subject along the same intrepidity, exclusively noted with Cancer; that doggone disease! Unusual gloom visited me every Wednesday, a million years ago when I had Mr Sanyaolu for two doggone periods of Maths!
I confess that I view those mortals with exceptional mathematical aptitude with a particular envy mixed with a measure of special disdain! The envy that stands toe-to-toe with that which I have for Rock Stars! And such special disdain most kids I knew growing up had for ’10 Hour’- that very bitter, antipyretic oral solution!
I probably could have mastered the subject, if the approach by my earlier teachers were less threatening, less menacing and the syllabus thrown at me quite interestingly. Mr Ajayi standing behind me with a ferocious scowl and a fearsome cane killed the fire, the spirit and all along the necessary zeal needed to independently work through the delicate maze of which Maths truly is. As I grew older, the part of my brain dedicated to riding numbers, radicals and algebraic items, in the manner an experienced Jockey rides a Stallion entirely got irreversibly atrophied from chronic uselessness!
Watching a documentary now about the female American mathematical phenom-Julia Robinson brought back the missed opportunities of living in the logical Utopia of the dreaded subject. She, again reminds me of another female maths phenom that I knew very many years ago at Fiditi: Temitope Sanwo.
Temitope Sanwo, like Julia Robinson and like many other Maths prodigies I’ve met appeared to me to be mostly simple persons, could be aloof sometimes; perhaps partly due to the constant flow of high numbers or algebraic radical items swimming through the nucleus of their brains. They were certainly not given to vanity like most of us and could be diligently devoted to anything the same way they were to the subject they love! Mr. Sanyaolu, a mathematically brilliant man came to class looking like a Hobo! l was almost sure, for years that he slept in his clothes. His eccentricities included throwing peanuts into the air while facing the blackboard, right in the middle of a maths problem and diving for it with mouth wide open, rubbery lips, pink tongue and all like a giant Bullfrog; as if there was a mental, mathematical calculation to that juvenile trick as well! Temitope, my very good friend was a bit heavy, careless about her appearance, too quiet and usually wore a red beret! An unrepentant fashion criminal whose life sentence was fully secured if she were to be arrested by the Fashion Police of the day! She eventually fit right in with the SU (Scripture Union) crowd when she got to the University!
Hard as she tried for me to be at the very least ‘averagely’ knowledgeable in the study of maths. I proved time after time to be a failed project! I was far gone in my ‘Cold-War’ with Maths. Kevin Keegan and his team: Bayern Munich attracted my time and attention better than Maths! ‘Not in this lifetime can I ever give it my full interest’ or so I thought!
If only I knew then what I know now about its importance, versatility; or of its all-round relevance to almost all of our daily routine, or if I ever got the supreme hint that it wasn’t just about Naira and Kobo, but about mastering its theory and following it up with the application, I swear I would, I could, I should have paid better attention!
Julia Robinson, an American and Yuri Matiyasevich, a Russian collaborated to solve the mathematical riddle of the Hilbert Tenth Problem in 1970.
