You can search for other academic interests I've written about before, so I'll try avoid repeating myself. One interest I sometimes mention is in dead languages, but I don't usually say what those languages are. I had the traditional schooling of Catholic children in the area of Australia where my family lived. This began with nuns, who were ancient and kindly, but who also sparked my interest in mathematics. I remember the excitement of riding my bike to school, about 4 km from our home, on Saturday mornings for extra classes in geometry. I loved that it was so certain. In geometry, we could prove things and be absolutely sure that we knew them to be true.
In high school, also Catholic, but this time in the charge of brothers and priests (it was a boys' school), my teachers were also very encouraging of my interest in science, and didn't push religion very much. Oddly, in my senior years, the brother who taught me physics and mathematics introduced me to philosophy - he gave me a book by a Christian philosopher, perhaps thinking that might protect my faith in Christianity. The result was pretty much the opposite, but I loved philosophy, which became my major at university.
Getting back to the languages, in high school, I'd been looking forward to studying Latin when I got to year 9. I was bitterly disappointed that the school decided to drop it that very year! I had never studied it formally, but was interested in Roman history and the classics, and really wanted to able to read the original Latin sources, also the Greek, but that could wait. When I got to university, I continued my interest in science and mathematics, but I also picked up Latin and Chinese. Why Chinese? That's what my parents wondered, too. This was long before China had become economically important, and worse, my main interest was in the classical version of Chinese - much as I loved reading Tang poetry, learning the ancient cultures, full or war and other exciting stories, and the philosophical ideas of Mencius and Motzu (I prefer them to Confucius), it was hard to explain why these things fascinated me. Perhaps it was the contrast they made with the very Western orientation of my other studies.
Wednesday 23 September 2015
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Noticeably, your story tells me that you have a wide variety of your areas of interest. One of them is similar to me; that is mathematics which has been evolving for several thousand years. Learning about number, formula, equations and the like really appeals to me because I often see the beauty of numbers and logic as well as ideas for proving mathematics principles, amazing me a lot. The particular fields of mathematics I quite favor are probability and statistic as both are also useful for human’s life. Obviously, they can be applied for predicting weather, stock market, conducting a research and so on. Specifically, when we need good evidence to support our ideas or beliefs, statistics play a critical role for being solid support of such points.
ReplyDeleteStatistics and probability are also important in AI, helping a lot in areas such as speech recognition. Even though I can't understand the mathematics, when I read articles describing how hidden Markov models and other mathematical tools are driving progress in these areas I'm fascinated. I also wonder then whether our own brains are doing similar things when we understand language.
DeleteThat's sound like Europe in 19th century Orientalism, China mania and Tang Poet's translation. Glad to read your story. I love this piece more than the Seeker one.
ReplyDeleteIt was a mania, but I think a healthy one. As well as studying the language, it was also necessary, or inevitable, that I learned a lot about the history and background culture. That was useful to give some balance to the otherwise very Western slant in my studies.
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