Computers, Mathematics and Me

The first story about mathematics that I know, it'll have to go all the way back to when my father was a kid, growing up – well Singapore has never been a truly poor country, but it was bad enough. His family was living in a hovel, and he had that Dickensian childhood, even though he's an old man now and we hardly ever talk about it.

His mother – my grandmother, who ended up living with us and helping to bring my sister and I up, well she did the best she could to bring him up under really difficult circumstances. It was a harsh childhood, but she was determined to get out of the poverty trap. She would say to him – beating the crap out of him occasionally – that there was gold buried inside those books. You just studied the crap out of them, and lift us up and out of here.

My grandmother never went to school, but she somehow managed to end up reading the classics. She never “amounted” to anything more than a homemaker, but the idea that anybody and everybody could be educated was a very powerful message.

As for my father, he did well in school and became some head boy, went on to get a professional degree, and did well in his career and dragged us into the middle class. He was also blessed with 4 equally intelligent and determined siblings who did well for themselves.

The second story of mathematics took place when I was six. By that time, my parents somehow instinctively knew that it was just a good thing for me to do well in school. My mother was always somehow inclined to find out what it was that I was good at, and once she worked out that I was good at mathematics, somehow she just wanted to push me in that direction. I remember that when she was driving me to school, she was so pleased that she had a six year old kid who knew how to multiply 2 digit numbers in his head. She kept on peppering me with those quizzes on my way to preschool. It felt normal at that time but when you think back on it, it's not really normal. She was raising me to be some kind of a freak show, and it kinda irked me later on in life to think back at it.

By the end of primary school, I was one of the best in mathematics. But after I got into secondary school, a lot of other people, who hadn't been pushed so hard by their parents, caught up with me. And by the end, I had acquired the reputation of being a guy who was gifted in mathematics but who didn't care that much.

In truth, what makes you care about mathematics is a lot of things. It could be your own innate competitiveness. It could be your love for numbers. It could be a sense of belonging in some kind of a community. But for me, though, it was something a little darker and sinister: it just simply was the one thing that I had always been good at. So I just had to push ahead with it, regardless of whether I liked it or not.

I still did well in school for mathematics. I never got to the elite mathlete level, but I was always 1 or 2 rungs below there. I supposed I never opened up about why I had hit the wall for mathematics, why, at a fairly crucial moment, I diverted my attention from mathematics to other endeavours, like drama and music. I needed those other challenges. I had to have something else to hold on to, other than being good at mathematics. I wasn't going to get far in mathematics because the other motivations I had for doing well (competitiveness, love for it) didn't exist. The only thing I had was talent.

The third story in mathematics was that I won a scholarship to go study at Snowy Hill University. That gave some little kick to me. Suddenly doing mathematics was cool again, sorda. I managed to push myself to do mathematics for a while. Then after that, the struggle set in again: the dreariness of doing it, not being able to turn up for classes regularly, being in an alien environment, being bored. Yes, I pushed myself to the finishing line, which was good. I managed to land engineering work, which was good. But perhaps I knew that in order to pursue work in pure mathematics, I had to love it unconditionally, and that's why I ultimately turned away from it.

What my mathematics training gave me was a quite powerful mental framework to work with. I could formulate and construct arguments that layed layers of logic upon each other. Writing proofs was of very little practical purpose, but the exercise of doing those things somehow helped my writing. A good logical argument went from A to B to C to D to E. In a way, it was easy to see what A and E was, but the real trick was to find B, C and D. Mathematics was good because it gave me plenty of practice. It helped me in other fields – history, economics, maybe even songwriting.

The fourth story in mathematics was that Snowy Hill was also a good engineering school, and it helped me to pivot towards coding. The good and the bad news is that what attracted me towards coding was the similarity to mathematics. On the surface, this sounds like a great thing. It's not necessarily so, but in the beginning it was. During my first year I took intro to computing and unfortunately allowed my partner to do most of the work because for whatever reason java wouldn't install on my computer. (Back in the day we mostly used desktops). In my second semester, there was a course that was based on the famous textbook, structure and interpretation of computer programs.

As an aside, that's the problem with me: I had to have somebody package something in a hipster package in order to make it attractive and interesting for me, otherwise I wouldn't really bother with it. I'm not a cool person, but I'm a sucker for cool. For example, REM was my gateway drug into Southern Rock, which I may not have been interested in if not for their image as hip progressives. I may not care for country but No Alternative was hip and I dug Uncle Tupelo / Son Volt / Wilco. And the hipness of Quentin Tarantino / Wu Tang Clan would make me go back and re-examine old Shaw films / HK kung fu flicks.

Maybe there was the Monty Python theme in some of the homework assignments. There was the notion that imperative programming was deeply uncool. I'll still remember the excitement that rippled through when I was introduced, for the first time, to ideas like recursion, O notation, functions as first class objects, induction in computer science. Although I have to admit that I wasn't really great at turning up for 9am lectures.

So basically when I was at Snowy Hill, I was mainly into pure mathematics, even if I did occasionally do some applied mathematics like statistics or chaos theory or numerical optimization. As time went on, I started to get a little disillusioned with pure mathematics. Probably that was the time when the hip factor started to wear off, and I started wondering what the point of it was, and that was when my thoughts shifted towards doing something that was more applied, because at least you could make a living that way. My thoughts drifted towards maybe acquiring a second degree, this time in computer science. It started to look cool.

And that was how it was like, during my last semester at Snowy Hill. It had been a lot of trudging through nasty probability integral equations, and finally I was sick of it. Instead I looked at what the computer science people were doing, and for a while it looked like fun. Pushdown automata. Compilers. Operating systems. In my last year, I studied microprocessors and neural networks, little realising that those were bets on the future that – well they didn't exactly pay off handsomely, but they were correct bets to make. When I went back to school later, I would find that the cloud and neural networks were developed to the extent that they helped to pave the future.

The fifth story would be my first encounter with computers. I went to my grandmother's place on Sundays, and there was an Apple II there. My parents used to trade stocks, and they got – well I don't know if it was a bloomberg terminal, but it looked like a computer and it had a modem. When I was 10, we got the first personal computer. It was used for typing school projects, and there were endless arguments about how much time I got to play computer games. It was an argument that was complicated by my mother being some sort of a computer game addict, and in a way she still is. Also, this was Singapore in the 1980s, and everybody shamelessly pirated anything they could get their hands on.

I still remember visiting Centerpoint often in the 1980s, and in Times the bookshop, there were plenty of computer game magazines which always showed you reviews of games. You were always trying to find out what the best games were. But anyway, I'll cut to the chase here: all too often, having fun and whiling away time was synonymous with playing computer games, and computers were synonymous with computer games. It was a 3 way relationship that I eventually decided was toxic. Eventually I didn't see the point of it. I'm a person who's pretty curious, but my curiousness lies on the side of philosophising. I wanted to know what human society was like, and I liked bookish knowledge. Time spent wandering around in some artificial garden that was built for you by some game designer was just distracting from this purpose. And in a way this was a source of my antipathy towards computers.

However, I would realise, this was yet another form of addiction. Later on, blogging and reading articles on the internet, be they news articles about a subject I already knew a lot about, or some movie or music review – all that stuff would be just another endlessly fruitless endeavour, albeit a more respectable one.

The sixth story was my working in the Factory. In the beginning, I was eager to bring my nerdy knowledge into the workplace. Gradually I was disabused of the notion that anything I learnt that had to do with longform integrals and differential equations would have any place in work process improvement. The only thing would be that they gave me a little bit of intuition about queues, but then again not that much.

This would be my first real engineering job. And for the first few years, I floundered at it. Engineering is very different from science and mathematics, because that's when executive functions come in, that's when being practical and having some common sense comes in. That's when having a little bit of organisational skills counts for a lot more than having pages and pages of equations. It was difficult to adjust.

Eventually, I picked up things little by little. The more interesting features of MS Excel, of MS Access. Coding in VB for applications. Using Perl for text processing. Using these tools to produce reports. And later on, there would be work on simulation modelling, and that would be my first big project in C. All this laid the foundation for grad school in computer science.

The seventh story was my escape from the Factory. It was a place that had a lot of cordial friendships that last till this day. But the churn rate was high, the turnover was high, and that's because a lot of the work was highly Sisyphean in nature. It just wasn't easy to make that boulder budge. There wasn't a lot of organisational buy in. You had to struggle your boss, and you had to struggle against your internal clients, sometimes both at the same time.

Getting into the University of Mexico was a bit of a coup for me. It was a 50-50 thing, and I had that bit of luck to get my foot in. It probably should have been a step up. Sadly it wasn't. I might tell you a lot about why not.

It was a great eye-opener. It may not be a big name school, but I think by now its reputation should be greatly enhanced. Unlike Snowy Hill, which tended to be very wonky, very nerdy, very science-y and a heavily theoretical bent, the culture in University of Mexico was very applied. And you could say that I struggled to adjust. It should have been the best time of my life.

I had to get up to speed quickly. What I remember learning was that there was this thing called the cloud, it enabled high powered computing to take place. This high powered computing, in turn, allowed great advances in machine learning to take place. It was the dawn of a new era of Big Data. I still remember thinking, every where you went, you saw that the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Something big was about to happen.

In the years following my graduation, the tasks started falling down. Speech recognition, facial recognition, machine translation, and playing Go. Artificial Intelligence was basically science fiction when I started grad school, and within 5 years, it became the buzzword. It's just a shame that I never capitalised on it. I did do some project on supercomputing and Hadoop. But that's pretty rudimentary. Maybe there's just so much to learn that you can spend a whole life time learning.

If things had stopped there, it would have ended on a great note. But there's the eighth story.

In the eighth story, I found work. IT was a nice place, what you'd expect from a tech workplace. Flexi hours, and I had colleagues who were pretty competent. It seemed like my dreams had come true. I could drink all the coffee I want, sit in a brick lined converted warehouse all day. Earn a nice paycheck.

The catch? IT wasn't actually something that I was that interested in. People were dealing with UX / user experience. Remember me developing an antipathy towards computer games because it took me away from my nerdier philosophical inclinations? I should have split and ran for the hills after the first few years. During the first few years, you pick up the basics, and there's every reason to be working for anybody who's willing to pay you. But after that....

There were things that I found endlessly exhausting. Making things literally pixel perfect. As in, aligning a line so that it fell on the edge of the pixel, so that you don't have that smudgy thing going on when you have a whole row of pixels with the intermediate color (this is called “aliasing”). There were times when there was some little HTML image element for every little thing in a web page, and you just had to make sure that everything fell into place, whether it was rotated or whatever. You had to make the flowcharts looking perfect.

I went into the job thinking that I had triumphed, that I had gone into a foreign land and done good, and landed on my feet. And it was a very gradual process, that my antipathy for what I had to do for a living had grown from a minor irritation to something that started to make me scream. At least when I was working for the factory, I had this natural curiosity about how to build a schema that would adequately represent physical objects moving around in the real world. That was fun. User experience was a bit like the colouring work that I didn't like to do as a kindergartener. Eventually my antipathy went up to the level that we just had to part ways.

During my last year there, there was some kind of a desperate lunge to salvage whatever I could from my years there. I tried to persuade myself that there was something interesting to learn. I could learn the computer systems that undergirded the application, which was some kind of a funky editor. I tried to make myself interested in the endless reams of code: we had a product that ran on two platforms, and there was a whole chunk of code which described behaviour, and two chunks that interfaced with the Mac and the PC. I tried to get familiar with them. I struggled to stay awake at work. Eventually I had to get out of there.

As I tell my story, I'm out here, in between things, alone in the wilderness. With every stage, it seems that I'm further and further away from what mathematics seemed to be at first, some kind of a game that I happened to be good at, some kind of pleasant dreamworld where I could just beat my classmates at, as though I were swatting flies away, some kind of nice garden of abstractions. It became more and more like some ugly, messy, but in some other ways, vital construction site, built on blood and sweat. And goodness knows how many more years I still have before me to carry on in coding and engineering.