Maths

 My interest with maths (yes I'm British, and here, maths is a plural noun) started when I learned my times tables up to 12, at the age of about six.  Learning times tables was boring, but my parents bought me a book "The Ladybird Book of Tables and Other Measures" which made it seem far more interesting.  The tables were shown on a 10x10 grid, and the patterns of each of the times tables made it interesting - especially the threes and fours.

A few years on, I discovered calculators, and my parents must have known what they were doing when they bought me "Calculator Fun and Games" for Christmas in the mid 1980s.  This book has spawned a whole series of blog posts for me, and the most recent (at the time of writing) are the Reverse Digits and Subtract post (1089) and Over and Out (a solo game where you try to reduce a six-digit number to zero within as few steps as possible - this was expanded to far more digits, and an algorithm).  So much so, I have created a whole category of Calculator-related posts.

I took GCSE Maths (General Certificate of Secondary Education, at the age of 16) which was compulsory, but also opted to do A-level Maths (A for Advanced, as a pre-university qualification) which I passed successfully.  I went to Cambridge University to study Natural Sciences, and that's where I lost my love of maths.  The problem was that at degree level, maths was far more complicated (and Complex) than my brain could handle.  I prefer complicated maths with simple functions - things like geometry, algebra and trigonometry - the kind of maths you can do with a scientific calculator; things like calculus or e or imaginary numbers were a step too far for me.  

More recently, I've realised that there are just too many puzzles out there that were left trailing through my education, including an interesting puzzle on 3D geometry: how does the steepness of a hill decrease as you change the angle you climb it.  I've also proved for myself that the tetrahedral bond angle (which comes up in Chemistry all the time) is indeed 109.5 degrees, and these are all filed under the Geometry category.