My father’s abilities to number-crunch was my first fascination. Without any formal education, he was able to play around with numbers. This fascination led me to be curious of how mathematics functioned in a society in which most were illiterate. Later on, I started looking for patterns or noticing relationships between ideas without actually intending to do so.
For me, learning mathematics has always been frustrating, in a good sense. It was more like why didn’t I think about it this or that way to find a solution. Whenever I was stuck on problems, I kept on attacking the problems from different angles. In other words, these frustrations never led temper tantrums. These frustrations made me more curious about solving problems.
I think that I liked studying mathematics, partly because of my mathematics teachers. Initially, many of my teachers were not experts in mathematics, but their enthusiasm towards teaching us the basics was contagious. Many of us loved our teachers more than the material that they were trying to teach.