Student Memoir Part III

Students do a lot of writing in their college career. Here is part 3 of one student memoir you might find interesting (Parts 1 and 2 are in the preceding posts):

I can identify the turning point. It was when we were modeling data with linear functions. Lines were not so bad; I could remember rise over run, y-intercept, the equation y = mx + b. But then we moved on to the application portion, where you had to somehow relate it to real life. By this point I was pretty savvy at making graphs. Despite the complaints of my classmates, I had come to enjoy Mathematica, the computer algebra system we used. I could plot data points and enter functions with relative ease. I could tell the computer to do calculations for me. It wasn’t a bad setup, really.
The previous class we had collected measurements of the wrist and neck sizes of ourselves and several other classmates. We’d made a scatter plot of the measurements, neck size against wrist size, and the next step was creating a linear function to capture the trend. I remember feeling vaguely surprised that I had all the skills to do so; I didn’t struggle with the assignment. And I was not used to not struggling with math.
I came up with my function. On Mathematica it soared upward through the scatter plot, a line stretching to infinity at either end.
It didn’t strike me at first, the enormity of what I had just done. Mostly I was just glad to have it over with, one more math assignment to put behind me. But as I thought about it later, about that single, perfect line rising through disorder, I came to feel an unfamiliar sense of awe. To find a pattern in randomness like that had to count for something. It was almost poetic. I felt I had glimpsed beyond the veil to a new, vast world. It was the same world I had lost after those first few years of life, that second sight every child forfeits for the sake of growing up. In that one, solitary line I had regained a bit of this world. Perhaps in learning we acquire nothing new; we are merely rediscovering what we have forgotten.
I’m taking Calculus II this semester. While math will never be my best subject, I’ve fallen in love with the way it makes me look at the world. Math is our hope for surety, for clarity, for order. Two plus two is four. But it also pleases our need for the abstract, our desire to study something that transcends the human intellect. It’s gloriously mind-boggling to think about the Koch snowflake and how it can have an infinite perimeter but a finite area. I like the idea of asymptotes, too, where a curve can keep reaching for a limit but never actually get there. Isn’t this a metaphor for life, happiness, love? All this time writers have painstakingly described that age-old thing in the distance, the thing that’s never quite tangible, when all they needed was a single word. For me, asymptote sums up everything we strive for. I think I’ve been waiting for that word most of my life . . .

The conclusion comes on Friday.