I Thought Everyone Saw the World This Way

When I was sixteen, I proposed to a girl with an algebraic equation. "If I am a function of x and you are a, then f(a) equals zero." It landed with all the emotional warmth of a failed proof by contradiction. She stared at me with an expression that oscillated somewhere between anthropological curiosity and mild concern. I, meanwhile, was quietly congratulating myself for having unified romance and algebra into a single elegant statement.

In retrospect, she was probably wondering whether I required psychiatric intervention more urgently than companionship. For years I blamed the rejection on her inadequate appreciation of mathematics. Only later did I entertain the more parsimonious hypothesis that most people do not regard functional notation as an acceptable substitute for flirting. The episode has since become family folklore, but it also revealed something far stranger than ordinary teenage awkwardness. I genuinely believed equations were a perfectly natural way to communicate affection. I was not performing mathematics. I was thinking in it.

That proposal was merely the most conspicuous symptom of a much older cognitive habit. Geometry had already colonised my perception. Staircases decomposed into right triangles before they became staircases. Ceiling fans announced rotational symmetry before they became appliances. Window grills insisted on becoming coordinate systems despite the architect's complete indifference to analytic geometry. Cracks on classroom walls resembled imperfect tessellations waiting for completion. Algebra proved even more invasive. Friendships became functions whose outputs depended on trust. Arguments resembled underdetermined systems with inconveniently missing variables. Success looked suspiciously like an optimisation problem constrained by time.

Whenever something confused me, I was less interested in what had happened than in the hidden relationship that generated it. Reality appeared to possess an invisible mathematical substructure and I regarded it as my civic duty to reverse engineer it.

I was not trying to mathematise the world. My perceptual machinery had apparently reached that conclusion long before I became aware of it.

For the longest time I assumed everyone inhabited this peculiar epistemic landscape. I imagined my classmates mentally factorised conversations and diagonalised classrooms with the same effortless regularity that they tied their shoelaces. Discovering otherwise was an ontological shock. Most people remembered school through friendships, cricket matches or embarrassing report cards. I remembered it through Euclidean constructions and symbolic manipulation.

Modern neuroscience offers an intriguing possibility. The brain does not function as a passive recording device. It continuously compresses overwhelming sensory information into economical predictive models. Every mind performs this compression differently. Some privilege stories. Others privilege music, colours or faces. Mine appeared to privilege invariants, symmetry and abstraction. Mathematics was never confined to textbooks because it had already become the grammar through which I organised experience.

People often ask when I fell in love with mathematics as though there must have been a memorable teacher, a miraculous classroom revelation or an inspirational Olympiad medal. I never know how to answer because the question presupposes a beginning. Falling in love implies an earlier state of indifference, and I cannot remember such a state. I remember only believing that equations could express affection as naturally as poetry and wondering why everyone else seemed linguistically underprepared. Perhaps talent is less about acquiring an extraordinary ability than about refusing to abandon an unusual childhood way of seeing. Education did not teach me mathematics. It merely informed me that the strange language I had been speaking all along already possessed axioms, notation and a remarkably large community of equally peculiar people.