Eric's Math Biography:
As much as I hate to admit it, I AM something of the traditional math nerd – at least when it comes to school. That’s not to say that I liked all of the math I saw, or that I always understood everything, but for the most part, I’ve enjoyed and had success with math.
Early on, I hated the timed arithmetic tests in elementary school - especially the division ones. But after that, a lot of my math classes seemed like interesting puzzles or games: the magic four-square and colored checkers that I now recognize as essentially counting in powers of 2; and many, MANY puzzles involving drawing colored arrows from one dot to another according to certain mathematical rules. I’m sure there was plenty of standard “manipulate-the-symbols” stuff, but I don’t remember much of the experience. I remember my 8th-grade math class, where we had a teacher who threw chalk when students were screwing around, and who teased people a lot. I tried hard to avoid being on his bad side, because when he was teaching us the math, I thought it was really cool. We learned how to solve four equations in four variables, and to create our own word problems for our classmates.