Mathematics

Maths is one of the main subjects I tutor.

If you like maths, you might be interested to know that eveny single mathematician to whom I've lent this book has persistently begged me to let them keep it until I've had to go buy myself another copy. It happens every single time!

If you think you don't enjoy maths, I believe you've just been taught it badly. Imagine if every day at school a teacher made a sound that a child hated and then told them that it was music. Then imagine that from then on, whenever anyone announced they were about to play some music, that child would block their ears so they wouldn't have to hear it. Then that child would miss out on all music (even the music they would have loved otherwise) for the rest of their life!

Not everyone likes the same kinds of music. In the same way, not all types of maths is for everyone. I can guarentee that there are at least some types of maths that you will love! And later, you can also learn to master and enjoy the types you didn't like, just as a musician learns to appreciate and be competent at playing the types of music that might not be their favourite, but to have become a musician in the first place, they would usually have fallen in love with some specific kind of music. But just as you don't have to be a musician to appreciate music, you don't have to be a maths wiz to appreciate the cool maths you might not have been shown before.

Please don't assume that just because I happen to be a maths genius, I don't know how to teach someone who wasn't born with a mathematically gifted mind. From experience, I believe I can teach almost* anyone to be exceptional at maths!

And besides. Was I really born a genius, or did I just start learning how to teach myself to be better at a very young age?

When I was 2 years old I often used to listen to a pigeon cooing outside and count the number of calls in my head in my own rhythm based version of Quaternary (base 4) since I hadn't yet been exposed to the decimal counting system most of the world uses. Whenever I reached 256 (one of my favourite numbers) I would wish the bird would immediately stop making noise because it had already just reached such a powerfully even number.

Also when I was about 2, I used to try to force a lot of things into a certain sequence. Years later, I discovered that this is called the Thue–Morse sequence.

When I as 7, I worked out that the hypotenuse of a square is equal to the side times the square root of 2. I would inevitably have discovered the entire Pythagorean theorem if school hadn't spoiled it for me (or if I'd had any interest in rectangles instead of squares before then).

While homeschooling, I taught myself to be better. Then I was the highest scoring grade 12 in Queensland for that year in the Australian Mathematics Competition

When I was studying physics and mathematics at university, I often had to explain some mathematical concepts to several of my own mathematics lecturers who would sometimes ask me for help, and even advice on how to teach it to the rest of the class.

Since I was a child, I've made many mathematical discoveries (usually in Number Theory, but other branches too) which I later found out were already made by others (usually long before I was born). You'd think that I'd check first to see if a problem had already been solved before I started trying to solve it, but where's the fun in that? I don't want spoilers to my puzzels, thank you very much!

I've probably made discoveries which others haven't made yet, but I'll get around to checking and maybe publishing those when I've finished things more important to me. If I do, I'll put links here, of course.

Later when I have time I'll post here some fun maths games, interesting curiosities, puzzels, videos, etc. Let me know if you want me to hurry it up and I'll prioritise it.