Why am I learning math in my free time?

During my time in school, I used to be a pretty bad student and was often referred to as the clown. I made everyone laugh and my teachers cry. In this time I never really learned or put in some work. I asked classmates for homework, tried to pass exams which resulted in bad grades and so on.

My math grades were pretty bad as well, what a surprise but I was still somehow fascinated by the nature of math, which was the reason why I took the so called “Leistungskurs” in German schools. I passed everything there as well but my grades were pretty bad since I just tried to pass the exam, did not do any homework, and so on.

However, during my last year, something changed. Our current topic were matrices and I liked to work with them, I was even more fascinated and could boost my grades a bit. I actually fell in love with math but I also realized that I created huge gaps in my knowledge during the years when I haven’t learned.

After I passed my A-Levels I wanted to study a subject that contains a lot of math. I started with mechanical engineering but it did not fit my interests and therefore I switched to computer science.

The mandatory courses for math here are analysis, linear algebra, discrete math, and statistics. I absolutely loved analysis, linear algebra and discrete math were very fascinating as well. The proofs were hard, especially with all the gaps I had because of my attitude in school. This was the reason I focussed more on passing exams instead of understanding everything, because I had to fill too many gaps to understand all the details, and there was simply not enough time to do this.

If I could go back in time I would probably have taken math as a degree because the math subjects in computer science sparked my interests even more. And this is the reason why I learn mathematics in my free time. Because I want to fill the gaps I created in the past and I want to learn way more about math than the computer science classes cover.