My Reflection Of Maths: My History Of Mathematics

I used to hate Maths. Doing pointless calculations over and over again and factoring polynomials for seemingly no reason. I remember asking, on more than one occasion: “What’s the point of it?” and “How will I use this?”. However I was good at it and I’d done a masterclass at the Royal Institute, which suggested there was much more to this field so I chose to do Maths and Further Maths at A-Level. Then in my first year of college my teacher introduced our class to the concept of proof. I immediately realised that this was the most pure truth possible. Since then I’ve found more and more beautiful proofs and learnt as much mathematics as I possibly can.
The first book on Maths I read was “Fermat’s Last Theorem” by Simon Singh. I simply couldn’t put it down. Every time I turned the page there was something new to learn about and obsess over. I was also struck by an interest in the history of Mathematics, all these interesting characters pursuing knowledge and beauty in it’s truest form. After Singh came a couple of books by Ian Stewart: “17 Equations that Changed the World” and “Taming the Infinite”. The first showed me many examples of interesting applied Mathematics, and the second went into detail on the history of maths all the way back to the first number systems. Recently I’ve been reading Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, a book about Riemann’s Zeta Function and the Maths and History surrounding it. It’s a fantastic read especially as I’ve been developing more of an