Peter's academic interests

My longest academic interests have been in mathematics and philosophy, although the mathematics is really the logical foundations of mathematics. This began when I was in high school, I guess around 12 years of age. I had never liked academic subjects much in primary school, but I had enjoyed reading then, and read most of the small school library. I was particularly interested in science - I liked learning about how things worked and why they worked the way they did. But none of the teachers were very good at mathematics, except for one nun who once taught geometry for a short time. That did interest me, and for similar reasons to the ones that later made mathematics a passion for many years, throughout high school and into university. Unlike everything else, the results of mathematics were not qualified by hedging words like maybe, perhaps, probably, almost certainly, possibly or such terms: the results of mathematics were absolutely certain, proven beyond any doubt. And I loved that. But then I began to worry about the foundations of mathematics: must 1+1=2? Why? And what are numbers? Do they exist? In what way do they exist? Questions like these led my mathematics and physics teachers in high school to point me towards logic and from there I moved to other branches of philosophy.